I've been using Composer 2.6.3 (trial) to covert a midi file to piano sheet music but I've run into a problem along the way where the program crashes when I attempt to play the song.
Steps to reproduce the error:
1. Download and open
Krondor.not.
2. Press the "Start Playback" button (or the spacebar). The program will either crash immediately with a Microsoft Visual C++ runtime error or hang for a few seconds and then crash with information such as:
Problem Event Name: APPCRASH
Application Name: Composer.exe
Application Version: 2.6.3.0
Application Timestamp: 4cda2d30
Fault Module Name: Composer.exe
Fault Module Version: 2.6.3.0
Fault Module Timestamp: 4cda2d30
Exception Code: c0000005
Exception Offset: 0058be85
OS Version: 6.2.9200.2.0.0.256.103
Locale ID: 1033
Additional Information 1: 4ee8
Additional Information 2: 4ee8c24e5f4695cb729117cc0e688c61
Additional Information 3: 10ee
Additional Information 4: 10ee0c82268cf75b8f7938f0f8aade07
Additional Notes:- Deleting the staves "Dynamix, Inc.", "Piano", and "Bass" before pressing play allows the playback to proceed fine so perhaps the issue lies within those staves. Unfortunately, there seems to be a larger issue because when I save it as a different file (after deleting the staves) and then try to reopen it I get the "file could not be opened according to its expected format" error.
- Another reproducible error using this file is as follows. Open the file and scroll to the very end of the song. In measure 126 select the super high A-flat note (the highest note in the measure) of the "Dynamix" staff by clicking on it. Then press shift-down arrow to attempt to move it to the next staff down. This results in a "Command is unexpectedly complex" warning. The issue is that notes in measures 129 and 130 gain additional flat symbols. Doing this a dozen times leads to a dozen additional flats on each note. Showing concert pitches (qscp) cleans up the mess.
- How I got to this point - I'm not sure what I did along the way to get to the state where my .not file appears to be teetering on the edge of doom but I started off with importing a midi file (BAKGM1B.MID) and then proceeded to re-bar, modify time signatures and tempos, etc. to bring order to the chaos that was the original transcription. After a fair amount of work I came back one day and found that it was crashing on me as described above. As I didn't want to start from scratch I'd try a variety of things such as re-transcribing, updating tempos, rebarring, modifying note durations, etc in hopes that it'd fix the brokenness. With a bit of luck the program would start working again and I'd be able to proceed with the process of converting it to clean piano sheet music. I came back to the project after some time away and an upgrade to Windows 8 but alas it's still crashing. I was able to get around it the other day but the crashing persists. So close yet so far away from completion... As this is my first project using Composer, the idea of shelling out $90 for a buggy program is not very appealing.