Hello Ian and Herbert,

I'll jump in to this thread with an attempt initially to clarify where you're finding usability problems with Composer in the area of rhythm transcription.

Composer makes decisions about transcribing details of MIDI note timing to notated rhythms that the user can control only with a few Transcription Options (which Sherry has shown in a screen shot above). My understanding is that you would like greater control over how these detail rhythm transcription decisions are made.

Let's dig a little bit deeper into your need for greater control over rhythm transcription.

One reason that a user will want to greater control over rhythm transcription is so that Composer will create more readable scores. If Composer is too "loose" in its rhythm transcription, then finer details are loss. For example, two short notes that should be notated as a sequence of two short notes might be incorrectly notated as a single 2-note chord. Or, a grace note in front of a 3-note chord might be incorrectly merged into the chord as though it were just another peer member of a 4-note chord. On the other hand, if Composer is too "tight", then the score is "over-notated" with complicated rhythms that don't make musical sense. For example, if you played a 3-note chord somewhat unevenly, you wouldn't want to ask another musician to play it mechanically the same as you did, with one note coming a 64th sooner than the beat, with a duration a double dotted 32nd rest shorter than the total quarter note duration of the chord. In transcribing readable rhythms, Composer must achieve a balancing act between transcription that is too loose, and too tight. Notation Software products have doing this notation rhythm balancing act better than any other software in the market for many years.

I suspect that some of your motivation for greater control over the details of rhythm transcription is more than just that of Composer’s primary goal in this area, which is to convert precise MIDI rhythms into readable notated rhythms. But let’s first just consider that particular goal, to transcribe readable rhythms. Composer doesn’t do a perfect job of transcribing readable rhythms. It’s a very difficult task to automate anywhere close to perfectly. If you want Composer to do a better job transcribing readable rhythms, how could Composer be improved to do that? One way is that Composer could offer more knobs to control lower levels of decision making in its rhythm transcription. Indeed, Composer internally has a couple thousand such knobs. During the years 1994 to 1997 or so, I spent a couple of man-years experimenting with these couple thousand of knobs to come up with a good balance between too loose and too tight notation. It was a huge effort tuning the knob values. In later years, I balanced the knobs for a few different styles of music, such as swing/jazz, which wants to bias the notation of swing rhythms (eg, displaying as a simple pair of 8th notes an actually performed triplet of two tied 8th notes followed by an 8th note). I could expose all of these knobs to the user, or perhaps consolidate them into fewer knobs that control lower level knobs in parallel. But I’m fairly certain that users would not be grateful if this were done. The extra control exercised by the user would almost always result less readable, not more readable notation. I know, because in my own extensive experiments, I usually have to adjust knobs dozens of times, making the notation worse, before I land on a good balance that makes the notation better. It was a lot of trial-and-error work, and I knew these couple thousand of knobs much better than any user could, even with a 100 pages of documentation describing how the knobs work.

So, in the future, am I going to offer the user more detailed control over transcription decisions? In general, no. For one thing, I don’t relish the idea of writing another 100 pages of documentation describing the knobs, that users would just complain about because it is way too complex! However, I would like to return to the programming of Composer’s transcription to further improve its decision making. Also, I’d like to offer more “Rhythm Styles” in the Transcription Options dialog box, where each distinct rhythm style is tuned with a different set of values for the couple thousand knobs, to product better transcription results for that distinct style of music.

This post is already long, but I don’t think it has yet addressed some of the most important underlying needs that you have for control over the rhythm transcription. If I understand correctly, neither of you (Ian and Herbert) are concerned just about producing readable scores. Rather, you want more control over the as-performed rhythms—how the rhythms actually sound. Further, you don’t want to use piano roll to visualize the precise timing of notes. Rather, you actually want Composer to over-notate the rhythms, in such details as would be unreadable by a musician.

Let’s return to an earlier example above: If you played a 3-note chord somewhat unevenly, maybe one note comes a 64th sooner than the beat, with a duration a double dotted 32nd rest shorter than the total quarter note duration of the chord. You’d actually want to see it notated in such exact detail! You’d like to see detailed as-performed rhythms actually written out in notation, so that you could then adjust the rhythmic details of the performance by manipulating the rhythmic notation, rather than by using the piano roll notation. Is that what you want?

Cheers
-- Mark