Staff View: Fixing Enharmonic Misspellings and Global Search and Replace

[Michael McBroom]

Cakewalk's enharmonic misspellings have become something of a pet peeve of mine. I realize that enharmonic misspellings don't matter acoustically. But if you're reading through the score, or if you want to print out a copy of it, then the spellings matter. Now, granted, it does a decent job of correcting many, once I bother to set a key signature. Like for example, setting the key signature to A Major changes all those pesky Db's to C#'s. 

But there are other instances where this doesn't happen. Cakewalk has a preference for certain spellings, which end up being rather inconvenient. Say, for example, I'm working on a piece in E minor, and I make a brief segue to E Major. Well, Cakewalk spells the G#'s as Ab's, necessitating my having to go in and replace every misspelling by hand.

Currently, I'm working on a piece in E Major. It's about 120 measures long and has 10 parts. The chord structure is complex, with lots of modulations. There are several instances in this piece where modulations occur where C naturals are called for, but Cakewalk insists on spelling them as B#'s. This is highly annoying. I'm about halfway through editing this work, changing all the B#'s to C's, except for one measure, in which B# is the correct spelling.

I mean, when a C Major 7th is being indicated, why can't the program have enough sense to recognize this chord and spell it correctly? Or F Major 7th, or A minor 7th? Etc.

When I think about the key of E Major, in this instance, and its relationship to other keys, you have to get all the way to  C# major before you have a B# in the Key signature -- 7 sharps! True, it's a move of three sharps either way, to get to either C natural or B#, but which is gonna be the more common spelling? When's the last time you've seen a B# in a score?

Even if the bakers were able to correct this misspelling habit, I recognize the likelihood that it can't catch all of them, which is why I'm also asking for a global search and replace (with confirm) feature, where I could type in the existing spelling and the requested spelling, then be able to confirm each replacement -- just in case there might be an instance where the spelling is correct. So, should it be too big of a project to fix the misspelling problems, adding a global search and replace feature to the Staff View would go a long way toward being able to deal with this issue.

[Michael McBroom]

Regarding a Global Search and Replace feature, something else has just occurred to me, as I'm working on another piece. This one has about 100 measures where one part is playing -- or supposed to be playing -- whole notes. But the MIDI got recorded as dotted half notes with a bit left over. Four part harmony, no less. So, again, mostly for the sake of appearance, I'm having to go in and edit the time value of some 100 x 4 = 400 notes from the dotted halves with change to whole notes. Not looking forward to this. I'm procrastinating; I'm about 13 measures into it. The only bit of time saving I've been able to come up with is to save the new value with a CTL-C shortcut to copy the new value and then CTL-V to paste it in replacement of the old values. Still tedious, but it saves a lot of typing.

So it would be nice if any global search and replace feature also had the capability to do searches and replacements of time values as well -- where you can specify one or more tracks. With confirm, of course.

Oh, and if Cakewalk has this capability -- that I'm not aware of -- please tell me how to access it.

[scook]

may want to review Process > Find/Change
 

 

[mdiemer]

I decided printing Cakewalk scores to be not worth it a long time ago. I found I was better off exporting to a notation program and fixing things there, where there is more awareness of musical notation. there are many levels to choose from, including free (MuseScore). You probably already know this, though. Just my two centavos. Plus, so few actually use notation that I didn't want your thread to suffer neglect!

[Michael McBroom]

Scook, thanks, I'll take a look at that link.

mdiemer, that's a good point. I have MuseScore3, which I do use on occasion, and I've found that it translates MIDI files very well. But when it comes to fixing aspects of the notation, I'm not so sure it would be any sort of time saver. It definitely looks prettier when it comes time to print something out, though.

Actually when I print a file I prefer the traditional jazz leadsheet look. You know, melody on a single staff with chord symbols above it. I find this to be most useful if I want to read through a piece. And for that, I find that Band in a Box still works best for me. Only problem with BiaB is it does a lousy job of handling MIDI imports, tending to make a complete hash of things, so it's only really useful if I've built the tune in BiaB.

By the way, I did find a much faster way to edit my MIDI file, changing those dotted halves with leftovers to whole notes. I saved the symbol for the whole note, "4:0" to the clipboard, and then in the Event List, I was able to edit the time values by double clicking on the value, which pops open an edit window where the current value is highlighted, did a CTL-V to paste, then proceeded to the next instance. Lather, rinse, repeat. This method is about 20 times faster than having to right click on each note, then replace the value in the popup. It should be worth noting that other values in the Event List can be similarly edited, although not with the greatest ease in some cases.

EDIT: Scook, I took a look at your link. The text seemed to indicate that values from 1 to 2 quarters could only be converted to a value of 1 quarter. I doubt this, so I took a look. Yeah, I've taken a look at this screen before, and honestly didn't know what to do with it. So I tried plugging in some values into the min and max duration fields, hit OK, and nothing happened. So I'm still puzzled by what this window actually does. I guess I'll need to read up on it some more.

 

Edited January 20, 2020 by Michael McBroom