Howdy guys,

While we do claim that Notation Software products do the best job of any software around at transcribing MIDI performance to readable notation, we don't claim perfection That's one reason that Composer has all the "fine editing" tools that it has - to allow the end user to tweak the notation and/or performance to get it like s/he wants it.

From a software design perspective, we have the task of finding the balance between how much of the process is "automatic" and how much (and how many) controls to give the user, and in what shape those controls should be to benefit the most users. Mark has mentioned the man-years(!) he's put into the automatic part. We've also put a lot of man-years (including all the excellent beta testers and user-reports) into the "controls and presentation thereof". Is it perfect? Not yet, but we're still trying.

However, I know from experience that because written communication alone is somewhat lacking, there are a lot of factors that come into play which affect the performance of any software application that slip through the cracks when it comes to written questions, reports, and comments. One thing we're trying to do more of is to watch people actually using the software. It's amazing what folks might do out of habit that they wouldn't think to report along with a query, or don't think of as affecting our software but it does. So in that light, there are "things" that can happen but that can be documented and reproduced with some digging. That's one of the reasons that I ask so many questions a lot of times - I'm trying to figure out what it is that someone is doing to recreate a problem that they may not realize they're doing, or don't realize that it affects how the software performs. It's one reason that I wrote up "On Writing Helpful Bug Reports" - you can find it here under "Tips on using this forum."

One example (this actually happened): I got a report some time ago from a trial user that sound was sporadic. So I asked him what he meant by "sporadic". He then said sometimes it would playback sound and sometimes it wouldn't (which wasn't too helpful of an explanation ;) ). Then he made the comment that he could play MIDI files fine with other MIDI players. So I asked him which MIDI players did he use. He reported that Windows Media Player played files just fine, but then our software wouldn't play the files. That little "then" tipped me off. I downloaded and installed the latest iteration of WMP, and sure enough, after playing around with it for a while, I figured out that it was resetting the MIDI volume control on my soundcard to '0', thus making it appear that any other MIDI playback device wasn't working properly. Apparently his computer would reset the volume to something audible when he restarted it, but if he'd used WMP prior to using Composer, Composer "wasn't working". (Notation products now check the MIDI volume on startup, so this is no longer an issue.) This is just one example of "things" that can happen.

So with all that in mind, we know the automatic part of the transcription isn't perfect, and we know that all you guys are trying to help us figure out what can be better. We appreciate the time and effort that you put into reporting problems and making suggestions, because we know how much we'd all rather be making good music

Thanks!
Sherry