David,

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With the new gliss and port markings available in Composer Pro, what I'd like to do is hide all the notes between the first and last ones in a glissando and connect them instead with a gliss marker. However, I don't think there is any way to hide notes in Composer, is there?

It might be a feature to think about, to go along with the gliss/port markings in Composer Pro.<!-/quote-!><hr size=0></blockquote>The glissando feature is already available in Composer Pro, which you can download from the Composer Pro section of this forum. The glissando will also also be available in Composer 1.1, which will be released at the same time as the first release of Composer Pro.

This first implementation of glissando is not ideal. If you have a glissando across the span of a half note, the correct notation is to show the beginning and ending notes as quarter notes, with a glissando line connecting them. In general, the total duration of the glissando should be divided in half to determine the notated durations of the beginning and ending notes.

If you only do that much, then on playback you'll just hear the two quarter notes and no glissando. There is no intelligence in the glissando mark as there are in other marks such as trills, turns, and tremelos. For purposes of playback, you'll need to create a second, hidden track that plays out the glissando notes on the same MIDI channel. For a piano or harp glissando, you would write out the discrete notes to be played. For a continuous glissando, such as played by a trombone, you would use a pitch bend and, if the glissando covers more than 4 semitones, as a pitch bend sensitivity RPN. Only Composer Pro supports editing pitch bend sensitivity RPN. Finally, in the original notated track, the note velocities of the two quarter notes need to be changed to zero.

I'm not very happy with this hidden track approach to producing performances of glissandos. Many notation programs rely heavily on the hidden track approach, but I think that is inconvenient for the user. Composer has employed a different approach where you can toggle the display of as-notated and as-performed. For example, you can view the notated trill (tr~~~~~) or toggle to seeing the written-out trill notes (alternating 32nds, 64ths, whatever). I'll probably do the same thing for glissandos in a later release.

This long response is not intended to side-track further replies about your country music pieces.

Cheers
-- Mark