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Staff view (score view)


Frank D. Baere

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No company wants to write notation functionality from scratch - the logical and fashionable thing to do is buy or incorporate existing product functionality -

  • Studio One (Notion)
  • Pro Tools (Sibelious)
  • Cubase (Dorico) - ok, they built their own, but they later assembled former Sibelius folks and built Dorico, but Cubase 11 implemented some Dorico funtionality
  • Sonar (Gibson passed on the opportunity to have Overture functionality)

The exceptions are Emagic Notator (Logic) and REAPER (who decided to roll up their sleeve and just write a pretty decent score editor).

Calkwalk's Staff Editor is decent for MIDI composing and editing (see JSG's work).  However, there may be a missed opportunity to be the de facto standard academic Windows music environment by not including improved notation functionality (if anyone feels that's important).

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1 hour ago, pbognar said:

Calkwalk's Staff Editor is decent for MIDI composing and editing (see JSG's work).  However, there may be a missed opportunity to be the de facto standard academic Windows music environment by not including improved notation functionality (if anyone feels that's important).

This I agree with 110%.  Bandlab/CbB  is missing a great opportunity. At least in another thread they are going to have a big update integrating Bandland part with CbB so that is great news. I guess we are beating the poor dead horse about staff improvement.
  CbB is a great DAW and for the few of us it could be really great with some notation improvements.   We seem to be in the minority camp and I have come to accept what CbB has to offer. I still prefer to use it over the other DAW's that I have.

Peace

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I cherish a dream, that one fine day Cakewalk team will be able to implement a fancy score editor.  They even don't need to start from the clean slate. There is  abandon-ware like MagicScore Maestro  or free (as in both speech and beer) LilyPond. I'm a big fan of CbB, not ready to jump ship and start using another DAW.  I do hope the bakers will find a way improve the Staff View or even adapt existing code from aforementioned software.

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Well, for me it's not really about "score" editing for the music I do . . . an improved staff view feature for me would be a more efficient way to compose and input notes and chords, and lyrics . . . that feels kind of clumsy right now when tried in staff view . . . but, I have a slick key command to continually switch between Staff and PRV, which works well enough.

I recall reading somewhere here (years ago) that the staff view module was coded outside of Cakewalk, and incorporated into the existing program. Those folks are long gone, so re-coding or modifying staff module would become a real mega project . . . probably better to incorporate something else that's currently out there.

Seems there's a bit of "catch up" happening recently at Cakewalk by BandLab . . . with additions of ARA2, Elastique Pro for Audio Snap, Articulation Maps, and Arranger     . . . but not much mention of Staff. I agree, if they are trending towards the education market, Staff improvements would put them in the game big time, especially since education and free software go together well.

Whatever is in the oven next, we never know until it's done . . . it's still got the best and most intuitive user interface of anything else I've tried out there.

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On 2/5/2021 at 10:08 AM, InstrEd said:

We want to make notation easier for the masses not harder 😆    I speak from experience with Finale :D   If I'm going for a top-notch published page then yes Finale/Sibelius etc is the way to go. 

I believe that if Cakewalk fully supported MusicXML, that would provide an advantage to more serious notation users. Being able to get the notation data in and out of Cakewalk with a better method other than using MIDI should be handy for them.  Cakewalk does support MusicXML export, so that's at least a start!

Not sure how that would work with MusicXML import, because then they would probably have to update the existing  staff view to better interpret and present the imported data.

It's a music markup language standard that's been around for 20 years for sharing notation data: https://www.musicxml.com/

Other DAWs that feature at least some MusicXML (read/write interchange ability includes Band in a Box; Cubase; Logic Pro; Reaper): https://www.musicxml.com/software/

Since many score and notation editors already support MusicXML, it would be great to be able to round trip your song data to and from Cakewalk and these 3rd party editors.

 

Edited by abacab
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11 hours ago, abacab said:

I believe that if Cakewalk fully supported MusicXML, that would provide an advantage to more serious notation users. Being able to get the notation data in and out of Cakewalk with a better method other than using MIDI should be handy for them.  Cakewalk does support MusicXML export, so that's at least a start!

Yes, Cakewalk does support MusicXML export, but this could be improved too!
I've been exporting sheet music from CbB using MusicXML but it's still on version 2.0, so when I open it on Musescore it won't reproduce tied notes. A workaround is using Finale Notepad as an intermediate, because it exports files as MusicXML 3.0 .

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Poor Dead Horse :(   We just can't stop beating him/her can we ;)

I thought Music XML might of been the answer  but it was only started and left abandoned.   I'm really thinking that Bandlab needs to acquire a notation company like Presonus did and go that route.  

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23 minutes ago, InstrEd said:

Poor Dead Horse :(   We just can't stop beating him/her can we ;)

I thought Music XML might of been the answer  but it was only started and left abandoned.   I'm really thinking that Bandlab needs to acquire a notation company like Presonus did and go that route.  

MuseScore is up to v3.6, and is open source. Source code is a GNU GPL licensed open-source program. https://musescore.org/en

And it has available iOS, Kindle Fire, and Android apps.

I wonder what legal issues the bakers would have bolting open source notation software onto Cakewalk with a GPL license, assuming the tecnical issues were not insurmountable?

 

Edited by abacab
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@abacab  That certainly seems like a route for Bandlab to pursue. I say Bandlab and not CbB as the notation should also be online with the Bandlab app for the educational market IMHO.    With Bandlab also working on it Cakewalk can piggyback the results into CbB.  Of course I'm not a programmer so I could be way off the mark on this :)   Musescore does look like it would do the trick for what most of us want the notation to be.  Not Finale top notch printing/layout but  functional.  I shall pinch myself now as to wake up from this dream.

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The product lead for MuseScore (with a background in typography and iconography) describes how he created the new default music font style for MuseScore 3.6. Very interesting...

Gives a short history of the DOS program Score, that inspired the new font, and also mentions hand engraving of the past.

 

Edited by abacab
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27 minutes ago, abacab said:

Sibelius may be in treble...

You must go into bad joke quarantine ;) 

I'm slowing learning how to write the strokes so Staffpad understands me and it is not too bad.  It is a wonderful program and neat to be able to jot down ideas sitting/relaxing on the couch.   I think both Finale and Sibelius need to worry about this type of program.   

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On 2/4/2021 at 9:32 AM, mdiemer said:

Yeah, it's not going to happen. Sorry to be negative, but on the old Sonar forum there was a thread on this that became on eof the longest in the history of that forum. they have made some minor tweaks, but not all of them have been received well, and most prefer the staff view that existed in the Sonar 8.5 days.

Having said that, Cakewalk's staff view is in my opinion the best of any DAW. Only Reaper's is as good. not because it's great as a notation program (far from it), but because it excels as a compositional tool. People rave about Cubase's staff view. I have tried it, and although it looks great and you can print decent scores (although still not professional quality), navigating in it is a pain. You can only select the notes you can see in the current window. There is no scrolling. Cakewalk allows you to scroll as much as you want. So you can select 100 measures if you want. to do that in Cubase, you have to exit staff view and use another view to make the selection.

In time, Reaper's notation feature is going to be the best of any DAW. Unless Studio One fully integrates Notion. I don't know how far that process has gone. I used Reaper for a couple years, but eventually got tired of the interface as well as the difficulty in routing midi. 

 

I agree.  After checking out Reaper, using DP for 18 months, trying Cubase for a few months and checking out Pro Tools, I have no doubt that Cakewalk's staff view is the best.  And now that the snap functions are completely fixed, it's even better.  I can see more staves and more notes on the Cakewalk staff view than I can on any other program.  That is very helpful.

My complaint, or question, is: Is it possible to export to MusicXML ALL of the tracks at once?   I could be wrong, but when I try to export to XML I can only do the staves that are visible, instead of the entire file.  So, if I have 40 tracks, which isn't uncommon, I cannot find a way to export all of them via XML.  Am I wrong about this?

Thanks,

Jerry

 

 

 

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2 hours ago, jsg said:

My complaint, or question, is: Is it possible to export to MusicXML ALL of the tracks at once?   I could be wrong, but when I try to export to XML I can only do the staves that are visible, instead of the entire file.  So, if I have 40 tracks, which isn't uncommon, I cannot find a way to export all of them via XML.  Am I wrong about this?

Thanks,

Jerry

I just tested the MusicXML export from Cakewalk with 18 tracks, and it got them all.

I had first opened up a classical MIDI score in Notion 6.8, "Haydn - Symphony 104 - I Allegro.mid", that I had obtained from Notion's score library - complete pieces, and exported it as a .mid file.

Then after opening it up in Cakewalk and saving as a .cwp file, I did a select all in track view, opened the staff view, and exported as MusicXML. All 18 selected tracks were included in the MusicXML export file. Opened that up in Notion and tested the playback. All of the expression was gone.

I'm not an expert in this, but it was obvious that while the note and instrument info was still there on the tracks, all the tempo, dynamics, ties, and many other important marking features in the score were lost in the round trip. And if you open up Cakewalk's MusicXML export in a text editor, you can see that it's still on v2.0, and not the latest. I also suppose that much of that score info was lost in the MIDI export translation.

Out of curiosity, I exported the same score from Notion as a MusicXML file, and then imported it into Overture 5. At first glance side by side, the score appears to have remained mostly intact with MusicXML > MusicXML.

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