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Better notation/staff editor


Feral State Sound

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Hey folks!

I think that Cakewalk always had a reputation among composers for it's great MIDI implementation. Nevertheless, now is lagging behind the competition and I think that one of the main factors is an staff editor with no changes in 10 years (if I remember well). I am not asking for and integrated kind of Sibelius/Finale but for more serious and competent notation tools in CBB. 

Thank you for all of this!

 

Edited by Alex H.
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4 minutes ago, chris.r said:

I remember reading somewhere that in the Gibson times Cakewalk was close to implement great 3rd party notation plugin, don't remember exactly which one... Overture perhaps? Maybe in future they'll come back to the idea.

Overture sounds right.... Ah, I found a link to the post: http://forum.cakewalk.com/Message-from-Don-Williams-Overture-5-Updated-m3699129.aspx

Maybe @Meng and Don Williams can have a conversation about this. Unless @Noel Borthwick and team already have something in the works.

 

 

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Better staff would be my biggest request too. All these chord tracks and shit can be put on the backburner :) Lets get serious about staff instead.  I was so bummed out when I read Overture was basically offering to give itself away for inclusion with Cakewalk but Gibson made yet another of its bad business decisions. 

We will see I guess, to me a great staff feature would make the program complete in my eyes. Not sure I am in the majority though, I fear the chord track, click and add crowd will win out.  I am only semi serious so dont be upset :)

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2 hours ago, Lee Darcy said:

This seems like a good area where Bandlab could sell this as an additional feature and where people would be happy to pay.

Don't sure about this... It is already an existing free feature. If you are quoting the old Overture offer " I felt bad for the guys at Cakewalk and on my own decided to help Cakewalk by offering to put a free light version in Sonar at no cost to Cakewalk or Gibson and we would sell an upgrade that provided full notation for a very small price" then I agree with you.

Edited by Alex H.
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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 months later...

I'd definitely like to see the staff view get some love - there seems a fairly pain free way to upgrade it using the offer from Sonic Scores, so why not move forward with it?

As well as benefiting existing users,  having a decent staff editor has the potential to make CbB great choice in the education sector, being free and all - that would certainly help drive adoption of CbB, and promote BandLab.

 

 

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Well Notion is owned by Presonus so I think that is a no go. Nobody needs a full blown notation in the DAW. Just usable notation and Cakewalk has let the staff view suffer for too long.  As full disclosure I have Finale V25 so I'm set on making great printable sheets.  I got Samplitude when Sonar went down and it has a good implementation  of a staff view IMO. 

2 hours ago, Matthew Carr said:

As well as benefiting existing users,  having a decent staff editor has the potential to make CbB great choice in the education sector, being free and all - that would certainly help drive adoption of CbB, and promote BandLab.

 

Totally agree with statement. CbB for the educational market needs to have a better STAFF VIEW/EDITOR!

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Anything would be an improvement over the current staff view. Agree that the educational market could be an attractive marketing point for Cakewalk.

Rather than re-writing the existing staff view, some sort of integration with a better notation package would be fine.

I have MuseScore, Notion, and Overture, and it would be cool if any one of those could be "plugged" into Cakewalk as the default staff view.  Maybe since MuseScore is free and open source, the developers would have minimal trouble dealing with licensing to include that as a replacement.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MuseScore

https://musescore.org/en

 

 

Edited by abacab
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I'm certainly not advocating a full blown score editor or a way to print/share beautiful scores - just a staff editor that works. If you spend any time with staff editor as is, you'll come across lots of aggravating  issues - try entering some lyrics and you'll soon want to throw your PC out the window!

Updating the component that the staff view was based on with the new version from Sonic Scores would probably address many of the issues, without Bandlab having to re-work the whole thing and commit a lot of development resource..

.. then again, it's never happened before, despite all the feedback and requests, so maybe there's a reason we don't know about.

 

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There are probably a few threads over on the archived forum that discussed this issue.

I seem to recall a mention that the Cakewalk Staff View was too deeply integrated in the code to make it an easy upgrade. They were afraid it would break something else if they attempted a quick fix for the Staff View. The obvious things could be involved are the integration with all of the MIDI features in the Piano Roll View, track view, event list, etc. But I suspect that it runs even deeper than that...

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It might be possible to wrap something like Lilypond or MuseScore inside a MIDI VST FX.

This would remove the integration issues with the existing code, as all you would need to do is:

  • Select the MIDI clips you want to edit
  • Right click->Process  Effect->MIDI Effects->[score editor plugin]
  • Score editor pops up, then you do you edits in the score editor
  • The score editor would then have to save the extra non-note information in some other file, and apply the note changes to the MIDI track

Issues might be:

  • Changing the code to work within a DLL rather than its own application
  • Handling clips over multiple tracks.

...but it should be technically possible.

 

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