Cross platform file conversion.

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Dr H
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Post by Dr H » Mon May 17, 2010 3:26 am

Hi, forum newcomer here. This must be a really great forum as the registration procedure was twice as tedious as typical. :)

Recently, a friend of mine bequeathed me an ancient version of Finale and I've been playing around with it for a couple of weeks. Although it's a bit 'fussy' to use, it seems to offer control over a huge range of notational parameters compared the the software that I have been using. So, I'm thinking of purchasing the latest version and making the move to Finale.

The program I have been using for a number of years is Music Time Deluxe, which I've pulled along from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95, 98, and finally XP pro. This software has met about 80% of my notational needs, but more and more I'm wishing I had access to some of the additional features that Finale supports.

My issue is this: I have literally hundreds, if not thousands of pages of music notated in Music Time Deluxe format. These range from simple lead sheets through full orchestral scores, and everything in between. Ideally, I would like to 'bring these scores across' into Finale format, so I don't have to maintain old software on an old system forever, in order to access them.

The question is, can Finale do this? If so, how? If not, is there perhaps a third-party app that will accomplish a Music Time to Finale conversion?

It would also be helpful if whatever method exists (if any does) had some sort of batch-processing mode, given the large number of files that I would need to convert.

One of the Music Time features which concerns me as regards conversion is the Music Time concept of "voices". It is possible to have up to 8 voices notated on a single staff, and assigned to a single midi channel. With 16-staves and 16-midi channels available, this gives a potential for 128 independent voices (spread across 16 channels) in a single piece. While I haven't quite gone to that level of complexity, I have made extensive use of this feature in many of my pieces.

The reason for my concern is that I've had some inconsistent results in exporting these files to other software (generally midi sequencing software). Sometimes the various voices are rendered as separate midi-tracks assigned to the same channel. Sometimes they are rendered as separate tracks and assigned to different channels. Sometimes two or more voices get "merged" into a single midi track.

The last situation becomes problematic should it become necessary to convert the midi file back into a notation file at some point -- once voices have been merged in this way, they essentilally cease to exist as separate voices notationally. Very annoying, not to mention labor-intensive if reconstruction becomes necessary.

Note that I am primarily concerned with notational issues, and not with midi issues. I'd like to get my scores in to Finale as notationally intact as possible, and with as little additional editing as necessary.

Given the large number of posters to these fora, I'm hoping that someone here has either dealt with this issue themselves, or can point me to a source of more information about it.

Many thanks, in advance.
Dr H


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michelp
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Post by michelp » Mon May 17, 2010 9:54 am

About your first question :
You could save Music Time files as midi files, which can be imported into Finale, but lots of things will be lost.
There is a more satisfactory method :
Most notation programs of today (Finale is one of them) are able to import a file format called MusicXML.
The problem is that older programs do not export in that format.
There is a solution, though, if you can save the original as a pdf file : PdftoMusic Pro (PC & Mac) is a software which converts pdf files originally made from a notation program file into MusicXML files (and also midi files), which can be then imported into Finale.
http://www.myriad-online.com/en/product ... sicpro.htm
"From a document in PDF format (that you can generate from any software, even from discontinued products), PDFtoMusic Pro rebuilds the original score, and exports it for instance into MusicXML format, useable in most of the professional score editors."


Update : Their other program "Harmony Assistant" seems to be able to import old Music Time files and export them as MusicXML files. See http://www.myriad-online.com/en/docs/diff.htm. And it is cheaper.
Michel
MacOsX 12.7.4, Finale 27.4.1 & 26.3.1, Mac Mini Intel Dual Core i7 3Ghz, 16 Go Ram. Azerty kb. MOTU Midi Express XT USB, Roland Sound Canvas SC-88vl, MOTU Audio Express. 2 monitors (27"' pivot, 24'"), JW Lua, RGP Lua

Dr H
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Post by Dr H » Tue May 18, 2010 4:58 am

michelp wrote:About your first question :
You could save Music Time files as midi files, which can be imported into Finale, but lots of things will be lost.
Yes, I'd already considered and rejected that idea. For those pieces which I actually realize on midi instruments I usually have two scores -- the notation score (for printed music) and the midi score: usually the two are quite different.

There is a more satisfactory method :
Most notation programs of today (Finale is one of them) are able to import a file format called MusicXML.
The problem is that older programs do not export in that format.
There is a solution, though, if you can save the original as a pdf file : PdftoMusic Pro (PC & Mac) is a software which converts pdf files originally made from a notation program file into MusicXML files (and also midi files), which can be then imported into Finale.
http://www.myriad-online.com/en/product ... sicpro.htm
"From a document in PDF format (that you can generate from any software, even from discontinued products), PDFtoMusic Pro rebuilds the original score, and exports it for instance into MusicXML format, useable in most of the professional score editors."
OK, that looks promising. I have converted some scores into PDFs by scanning the printed scores into PDFs. Of course that involves printing out every page that I want to transfer, and then scanning it back in, but that's still better than having to manually re-notate everything.

Update : Their other program "Harmony Assistant" seems to be able to import old Music Time files and export them as MusicXML files. See http://www.myriad-online.com/en/docs/diff.htm. And it is cheaper.
That looks even more promising. I'll check these out.

Thanks for the response.
Dr H

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miker
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Post by miker » Tue May 18, 2010 1:27 pm

For PDF toMusic Pro to work, you don't print and scan. It has to be a PDF made directly from the Finale file. Use something like PDFCreator to "print" the doc as a PDF, and bring that into PDF to Music.
Finale 27 | SmartScorePro 64
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michelp
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Post by michelp » Tue May 18, 2010 1:42 pm

miker wrote:For PDF toMusic Pro to work, you don't print and scan. It has to be a PDF made directly from the Finale file....
Miker is correct, but I think he ment "directly from the Music Time file"
Michel
MacOsX 12.7.4, Finale 27.4.1 & 26.3.1, Mac Mini Intel Dual Core i7 3Ghz, 16 Go Ram. Azerty kb. MOTU Midi Express XT USB, Roland Sound Canvas SC-88vl, MOTU Audio Express. 2 monitors (27"' pivot, 24'"), JW Lua, RGP Lua

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miker
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Post by miker » Tue May 18, 2010 2:55 pm

Yes, Michel, that is what I meant. Thanks for catching it.
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Dr H
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Post by Dr H » Tue May 18, 2010 5:35 pm

miker wrote:For PDF toMusic Pro to work, you don't print and scan. It has to be a PDF made directly from the Finale file. Use something like PDFCreator to "print" the doc as a PDF, and bring that into PDF to Music.
Um... why would that make a difference? My understanding it that a PDF is a PDF, no matter how it's created. Hence the "Portable" in "Portable Document Format".

Seems like if there are different PDF formats, the format isn't exactly "portable."
Dr H

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miker
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Post by miker » Tue May 18, 2010 7:49 pm

That's because when a PDF is made from the music file, it contains certain elements such as staff lines, bar lines, clefs, etc. that PDFtoMusic recognizes in the code. When you scan a file, all you are doing is, in effect, taking a picture of it. So those elements are not encoded in a way that the program recognizes.

You can read about it at http://store.recordare.com/pdftomusicpro.html There is a demo that you can download and try out.

I have the program. It works.
Finale 27 | SmartScorePro 64
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Copyist for Barbershop Harmony Society

Dr H
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Post by Dr H » Tue May 18, 2010 9:06 pm

miker wrote:That's because when a PDF is made from the music file, it contains certain elements such as staff lines, bar lines, clefs, etc. that PDFtoMusic recognizes in the code. When you scan a file, all you are doing is, in effect, taking a picture of it. So those elements are not encoded in a way that the program recognizes.

You can read about it at http://store.recordare.com/pdftomusicpro.html There is a demo that you can download and try out.

I have the program. It works.
Hmm... it still doesn't make sense to me that a format supposedly designed for universal portability across platforms would exist in more than one version, but I see that it does.

Weird: it's like having three different versions of "plain text".

This being the case, it seems like the better option is to go with Harmony, and translate the Music Time files directly into MusicXML. It looks like MusicXML is more universally recognized, and I really don't have much other reason to want everything in PDF format. Typically I only use that
if I want to e-mail a score to someone, and that happens only rarely.
Dr H

Warren Barnett
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Post by Warren Barnett » Wed May 19, 2010 4:38 am

The difference is that a scanned page converted into a PDF is just a PDF of a photograph. When you print to a PDF you are actually printing lines and filled-in ovals to a PDF document using the actual PDF formatting. Each line is separate from the next, and the PDF file knows this. It has nothing to do with, as you said, existing in more than one version. If you print a photograph, you just print a bunch of dots in various locations with various intensities and various colours. When you print from a music (or similar) program the printer is being told to "Print a line starting at point A1B1 to point A2B2". Both formats are completely normal for a PDF, but PDF2Music actually realizes that it is line and not just a bunch of dots.

Warren

Dr H
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Post by Dr H » Wed May 19, 2010 10:00 pm

Warren Barnett wrote:The difference is that a scanned page converted into a PDF is just a PDF of a photograph. When you print to a PDF you are actually printing lines and filled-in ovals to a PDF document using the actual PDF formatting. Each line is separate from the next, and the PDF file knows this. It has nothing to do with, as you said, existing in more than one version.
<shrug> I'll take your word for it. To me, a portable format is one that exists in a form which conveys all relevant information to any software used to open it. Plain ASCII text, for example, is going to look the same whether I open it in Notebook, MSWord; Corel WordPerfect; Pica Editor; or a 1989 version of WordStar.

Cruising around the web I did find a number of people griping that PDF wasn't really "portable" in this way, though.

But it's a moot point, since there seems to be a way to accomplish my primary end without messing with PDF at all. (Harmony)


On a more critical issue, has anyone here ever personally converted Music Time files -- by whatever means -- to Finale files successfully? If so, how did having 7 or 8 voices per midi channel make the transfer? The old version of Finale I've been playing with suggests that this might be dealt with in "layers," but there only seem to be 3 or 4 layers available, so I'm not clear on how that would deal with 8 voices.
Dr H

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michelp
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Post by michelp » Wed May 19, 2010 10:11 pm

Finale has 4 layers, and each of them has 2 "voices".
Let's hope that the MusicXML format transfers everything correctly...
Michel
MacOsX 12.7.4, Finale 27.4.1 & 26.3.1, Mac Mini Intel Dual Core i7 3Ghz, 16 Go Ram. Azerty kb. MOTU Midi Express XT USB, Roland Sound Canvas SC-88vl, MOTU Audio Express. 2 monitors (27"' pivot, 24'"), JW Lua, RGP Lua

Warren Barnett
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Post by Warren Barnett » Wed May 19, 2010 10:33 pm

A PDF file is portable because anyone can open it with the free PDF reader that Adobe makes available to everyone. Just because it contains text, does not mean that it can be opened with a text viewer. A PDF file is a pretty sophisticated thing. Every page can have several links from different areas on the page, sometimes text, sometimes a graphic, and sometimes a "whatever", that will take you somewhere else in the document, CD, web, or wherever. It is portable because, although it costs hundreds of dollars for Adobe Acrobat, the Adobe Acrobat Reader is free for everyone. As far as "conveying all relevant information to whatever software is used to open it", it is dependant upon the information that is stored in it in the first place, and what information the software that opens it chooses to interpret.

Warren

Dr H
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Post by Dr H » Thu May 27, 2010 12:44 am

Warren Barnett wrote:A PDF file is portable because anyone can open it with the free PDF reader that Adobe makes available to everyone.
LOL! That's like Microsoft saying that their prorietary PC software is "portable" because anyone -- even Mac users -- can go out an buy a PC.
It is portable because, although it costs hundreds of dollars for Adobe Acrobat, the Adobe Acrobat Reader is free for everyone.
That may be how Adobe sees it, I suppose. "Free" is not the same as "portable." My public library gives me free access, but it's certainly not portable. My laptop is portable, but it certainly wasn't free. ;)
As far as "conveying all relevant information to whatever software is used to open it", it is dependant upon the information that is stored in it in the first place, and what information the software that opens it chooses to interpret.

Warren
I hear what you're saying. IMO, though, this constitutes sort of an advertising gimick by Adobe. True portability, or at least something closer to it, is represented by the ASCII text file, which is not dependent on a particular software platform -- free or otherwise -- in order to be viewable.

Oh well, wandering off-topic here. I tried the demo of "Harmony" and although the demo is pretty limited, it looks like it can probably do what I want in terms of converting MusicTime files into something that a contemporary version of Finale can handle. And four two-voice layers in Finale should be adequate to deal with the 8-voice MusicTime option.

Thanks for the info and feedback, everyone.
Dr H

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