Howdy guys,

I'm jumping in on a couple of items here...

Tim, I don't know about anyone else, but *I'd* be interested in hearing your mass setting A friend of mine wrote a sort of "folk mass" setting some years back (make that about 9), that we did in Latin, with guitar, piano, mandolin, bongos, bowed psaltery, and tambourine (this was in a Protestant church, btw ) It was really fun and challenging musically, and it really gave me an appreciation for the form and flow of the mass service.

Re. Biab and changing anything - I have version 12 (I think Clyde's is newer?), and you can't make any permanent edits to anything except for the melody line, and then only if it's one that you entered or recorded. It was one of the things that frustrated me to no end when I first got it, because something it generated would be so close to what I wanted, but not exactly, so I'd edit it. Well, next time around, the edits would be gone, gone, gone! And if you tried recording a performance and printing out sheet music to match it, you might get the same thing, or you might not

I then found out that each time it "plays" a song, it generates a new performance, unless you use the little "+" button, and then it's not guaranteed to keep the same performance, in my personal experience. This is because what Biab does is to have a number of patterns for each instrument for each particular style, and it puts a particular pattern in each measure based on a weighted scale for each pattern (ie, is it near a style change? is there a chord change? etc.) They do it this way because then when you save a song file, all you're really saving is a pointer(s) to the style file(s) (installed in the "bb" directory) and the chord changes, so those files can remain quite small, even smaller than .mid files.

Anyway, suffice it to say that when my buddy on my church bass list told me about MidiNotate, I was ecstatic! I could get something in Biab that had the feel I was after, then I could save a .mid file, and then edit that and record a performance and give the players the exact sheet music for that performance. I've used this to generate arrangements for lots of music that we play at church, and it's a wonderful thing

ttfn,
Sherry