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Merging voices, merging staves


Only just started trying to use Smartscore, not finding it intuitive after using sequencing software but getting there with the things I'm trying to do. There are a couple that I'm not even sure are possible though so would like some guidance.

Some parts on the same stave are being flagged up as separate voices - one set of black notes and then a set of red notes underneath it. I don't need/want this as it can complicate a MIDI output, is there are way of merging those two voices into one?

Also I'm trying to arrange a two-piano piece for one piano, so at the end of the process once I've removed the notes I don't need, is there an easy way to collapse the two piano staves (e.g. four staves in total) down to one piano stave (two staves in total)?

I can move notes from the bass clef of one piano stave to the treble clef of the same piano stave, but is there an easy way to move notes from one piano stave to the other piano stave?
3/19/2017, 8:26 am Link to this post Send Email to GoldmanT   Send PM to GoldmanT Blog
 
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Re: Merging voices, merging staves


Maybe tlwebb will see this thread since he knows a lot more about MIDI stuff than I do.

My view is that you can't merge the voices. If I'm holding a whole note and underneath it is a series of eighth notes for 2 beats that are to be played while the whole note is held it needs to be represented as a different instrument (even if it is still a piano).

SS will write a MIDI Type 1 file if that is of any help.

Apart from the Cut/Copy and Paste which allows you to merge or overwrite the Paste I don't know how you would attempt this. What you want to do may be better achieved in a full-featured notation program like Finale or Sibelius etc. SmartScore's primary function is recognize scans and produce a notation file.

If you haven't, look through the SmartScore manual; it contains a lot of good information on the various features of the program.

---
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Re: Merging voices, merging staves


Thanks for this - I think I can work around the MIDI thing by setting all of the voices on a stave to the same MIDI channel before exporting as a type 0 file, then the receiving application will see them all as the same track and display them together.

Ideally I would use the full SmartScore software and export as MusicXML but I couldn't justify the expenditure as I'll probably only use it a couple of times a year.
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Re: Merging voices, merging staves


I made a bit of progress in that using the MIDI Event view you can actual change which voice each note is assigned to, so I could go through and assign all of the notes to the same voice - long winded but possible.

There is something in the How To pdf (10.4.10) about copying and pasting from multiple tracks to the same track, that sounds like what I'm looking for so I'll try to work out how that's done.
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Re: Merging voices, merging staves


Busy couple of days, so I'm just checking in here now. I'm going to have to think this one over a bit though. If you're only used to working with sequencers (which frankly I have NOT done much of) rather that conventional notation software and music OCR like SSX (which are both what I AM familiar with), there are some fundamental issues in the latter that you would have handled differently in the former. The major one of these is "rhythmic consistency" within each measure. So as ZootS has noted, if you have two different rhythmic "lines" (called voices in SSX) in a measure, each one has to have all of the beats in that measure accounted for. Why? Well, as in ZootS' example say you start a whole note on beat one, and on beats 2 and 3 you have a series of four eighth notes starting two lines below the whole ascending through that pitch to above it. How could you possibly do that, you ask? Well, what if one line was a violin "part" and the other a viola "part. Notation is not necessarily restricted to one part per staff. I'm sure there are other examples that would more clearly illustrate the fundamental issue, but I'm not being all that clever right now.

On a separate note, in your attempt to merge the dual piano score, I think your best bet would be to remove all the "unwanted" notes, move the notes in one part to voices that don't conflict with those in the other part, then copy and paste from one staff to the other. In the end, you'd simply delete the old staves, leaving only the combined ones. I'm not sure that will work--I confess I've never, ever tried to do anything like that. If I remember, and find some time to actually do something music software related tomorrow (either or both not likely, but maybe) I might just try something like that out of curiosity.

One of the problems I'm facing, and as I said, I'm having a bit of trouble getting back into a music mode of thinking after a couple of trying days, is trying to figure out what exactly you're trying to accomplish. You don't say what your "target application" is. You don't mention which edition and version of Smartscore you are using, except at one point you mention cold try using the "full version" and "export as XML". IIRC, all editions of SSX2 except the Midi edition permit export to XML. If you're using the Midi Edition, you may have other limitations to deal with as well.

I'm out of ideas for how to help you right now. Give us some more info to work with.

---
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Re: Merging voices, merging staves


Thanks for responding. I think I'm going to ignore the voices thing for now as originally I was going to export to MIDI, import to Musescore to tidy it up, but there would be way too much work in tidying up accidentals etc. So I'll just get a score I like in Smartscore and then screenshot it onto a blank document and print it from there. It's only for my use anyway.

Yes, basically what I'm looking to do - I have two piano staffs, so a set of treble and bass clef and then another set of treble and bass clef. What I'm looking to do is move some notes from bass clef 2 onto bass clef 1. I've tried copying and pasting in the score view but it seems hit and miss whether it works out or not, and then I need to find some way of aligning all the new notes rhythmically with the old notes in the treble clef because it pastes the notes exactly where I click them, rather than auto-aligning them.

I'll keep trying but anything you can experiment with to help would be great, thank you. emoticon

edit: yes, using Smartscore MIDI, the latest version as only just downloaded it.

Last edited by GoldmanT, 3/21/2017, 12:16 pm
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Re: Merging voices, merging staves


quote:

I've tried copying and pasting in the score view but it seems hit and miss whether it works out or not, and then I need to find some way of aligning all the new notes rhythmically with the old notes in the treble clef because it pastes the notes exactly where I click them, rather than auto-aligning them.



Again, I've not really done this, but keep in mind the concept of rhythmic consistency. In the part you're copying from, if the notes you want to keep don't have enough counts to fill the measure, SSX can't know where they belong in the target. You may have to add rests to make this work--you can hide them later, or delete them if once pasted and perhaps re-assigned to a different voice from that in their original location to match where you want them to "fit" in the new combined system. Joining notes in different voices (in the same staff) to the same midi event time is done by selecting the two applicable notes and using the "Join Selected Voices" action (menu command "Edit->Special->Vertical Alignment" or hot key "Y"). As ZootS already suggested, if you haven't yet downloaded the indispensible "Using SmartScoreX" PDf manual (downloadable from the Help menu) do that, and spend a little time there in the section dealing with "voices". It also includes a hotkey "keyboard map" that I keep on the side of my PC next to the monitor--with the mouse in your right hand and hitting hotkeys with your left, you can quickly use the SSX editing features which are customized for editing recognized scores. It takes a bit of getting used to and requires that you get used to the application's nomenclature for things, but like every other software application I've used--and in my career as an engineer that covered a LOT of applications--the time is generally well spent.

Now as to how these inserted notes get integrated into the target staff, I'm on more shakey ground without something concrete in front of me rather than in my imagination.

On a another plane, in my very limited exposure, dual piano scores usually are the result of a composition where elements of the two parts cannot be physically played by a single person with only two hands of five fingers on single keyboard, so reducing this to two single (LH/RH) parts that is actually playable live might be problematic. Reading the original posts I was wondering if your "target application" might be some performance engine app such as Cantabile where you had different instruments playing the different parts, which could be one way of actually performing a quasi-dual keyboard composition that you couldn't perform by yourself.

Back to the voices issue though: SSX allocates four voices to each staff. On a standard "Grand (Piano) Staff" (which is sort of handled as a single staff to accommodate cross staff fingerings)the treble clef is voices 1-4 and the bass clef is voices 5-8. As I mentioned you may have to consider this when setting up your copy/paste operations between the two parts, and maybe supply rests (perhaps hidden--but that's another issue) and/or change the assigned voices to make the transfer work.

Again, I'm shooting in the dark, and I really haven't encountered a need to to do this particular sort of thing. I also generally do not use SSX to print notation, only to get a playable midi file from the printed score. That said, I would posit that using SSX to generate a midi file from which I would then use another (notation) application to generate a printable score would be counterproductive. Midi is a performance specific standard. NoteOn and corresponding NoteOff midi commands at specific midi event times do not directly translate into duration specific notes/dots/tie elements modified by various articulations (slurs, staccatos, legatos, etc). In fact if you do a "Save As" a midi file in SSX you're offered the option of removing (for notation) or including (for performance) the articulations information in the midi data. This digital music universe is not a trivial space. Consider that if you've ever consulted Read's treatise on notation how many variations and alternative methods exist in just that arena.

Given the opening paragraph of your 03/20/2017/11:32p reply, I might just suggest that if you want a printed version of your "merged" score, just use Musescore (or some other notation program of your preference) to creat a new score of what you want. It will probably be faster in the long run. In the stuff I was doing for the choir I played with for a couple of decades--before its demise--that's what I found to be the case if I needed a decent printed score. I used SSX to make midi and/or audio practice aids for section parts, and composites for reference--there was nothing easier for that task, except in a couple of instances where it actually turned out to be quicker to re-annotate the piece from scratch. But a really good printed score was really hard to achieve.

Good luck with your adventures.


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Re: Merging voices, merging staves


Thanks again for looking, it's much appreciated.

If you're curious for an example, I've uploaded an ENF file: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzMrF-jaeW8MMVVHbkdsRlBTUUE

As a broad example, in bar 1 I might be wanting to move the notes on piano 1's bass clef to piano 2's bass clef. In bar 2 I tried cutting and pasting but it just pastes the notes wherever the cursor is, without aligning them with the notes above, and I can see from the MIDI events, piano roll and playback that some notes are missing. If you're able to tell me how to fix that it would pretty much solve my problems.
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Re: Merging voices, merging staves


Regardless of ANY softwares' claims, most of them are designed to do one thing better than anything else. They will add features to do more, but generally, they are of second tier importance, and they don't work as well as a program designed to do that.

Cases in point:

Finale is not a DAW
Cubase is not for printing notation
SmartScore is not a score editor

(I don't mean to imply that these are the only programs for their various tasks.)

My point is, use SmartScore to scan and recognize your printed score, and correct errors in recognition. Export the XML file to Finale, and merge layers and staves, there. Use Cubase if you are composing in MIDI. Again, take the MIDI to Finale for preparing your score.

I guess my real question is, if you aren't using SmartScore to scan, are you sure that another program might not be better suited to what you're doing?

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Re: Merging voices, merging staves


Smartscore Pro and Finale Print Edition is $320 worth of software, way beyond my needs.

I did start with a scan, which would have taken me weeks to enter manually. If Smartscore has note editing, entry and copy/paste facilities then I'd expect to be able to do the task outlined at the end of my last post but I can't get the notes lined up properly.

edit: I tried it in piano roll as per the manual, and even when it displays properly in the piano roll view, the score view is still messed up. I've put an email into the tech support so will see if anything comes back from that.

Last edited by GoldmanT, 3/23/2017, 10:56 am
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