Re-newing my request to have the option to edit lead-in bar to include only the note(s) needed and no extra beats. ie: A quarter note pick-up note with no rests in front of it. Thanks

Support before, and supported now.

+1

I would much prefer that the length of every bar is determined by its contents. Either the number of notes, or the number of syllables in the lyric.

The current printed notation has fixed length bars on each staff, so a bar of one note, or sixteen on the same staff is exactly the same printed size. You can change the number of bars on a staff, but they are always an equal length.

It has always been this way, and until PGMusic changes the printed notation component, I think we're stuck with this.

+1 for dynamic bar lengths, but I am not holding my breath.

+1 Bump!

If the leadin bar (not the first bar) has notes in it, any lead in rests are replaced by the countin. So instead of 1-2, 1-2-3-4, you might get 1-2, 1-2-3 followed by the first note.

Am I missing something?

If the problem is printing 5 bars, rather than 4 on the first staff, my reply still stands - good luck, but don't hold your breath.

I'm only concerned with the lead sheet print out. If I have a quarter note pick up I don't need to have a half note rest and a quarter note rest in front of it.

Dave, the intention is to get a display like this.

+1 Exactly what I would like.

I understand, but the fact is that BIAB always has bars of an equal length on a staff. PGMusic counts the leadin bar as a full bar regardless of the number of notes, so generally it takes up 1/5th of the staff (assuming you normally have 4 bars per staff).

I would also like notation to have short bars where appropriate. Consider the ending bars where there may only be 1 note over 2 bars. It's quite unnecessary to have that take up half a staff. The opposite is also true - a bar with lots of notes will look better if it's spaced properly.

BIAB is great, but it's notation could be much better. We have been waiting for better notation for a long time. 2004 brought us 'fake sheet' but not much since. Some new ways of entering notes, but printing has been pretty much stagnant

Although many think that this is a good idea I do not agree. BiaB is a program for doing backing tracks and it is not a notation program. One can take a BiaB song over to a notation program, Musescore 2 (https://musescore.org/en/2.0 ) is a free one, and it will do want you want. I would rather BiaB spend its resources on generating new styles and RTs and not on notation.

This type of suggestion is not limited to BiaB. Over on the Sonar web site the same argument is happening. I can see better notation on DAWs, even RB, but not on BiaB. In both cases I doubt that the notation will be as good as a dedicated notation program.

Just my opinion.

This issue can divide people who generally agree on most other issues.

I concur with Mario that BIAB is not primarily a notation program and better alternatives exist, even free ones. Fixing this leadin appearance is thus way down on my wishlist. However, I am one of the more persistent voices on the SONAR forum for better notation. How can these positions be consistent?

SONAR used to be better at notation, got worse, and went over a decade with no improvement. At least recently, it's slightly improving. But the difference between SONAR and BIAB is this: SONAR marketed itself for its notation. Even so, most on the SONAR forum are not supportive of improvements to notation! It is my opinion this stems from two causes: 1) they can't read music and don't understand why those who can think it's important, and 2) notation is a terrific way to edit music within the DAW. It has nothing to do with how it looks printed, but they aren't listening when we say this; they think we want SONAR to be Finale.

If the notation of BIAB hindered me from using the program for composing and arranging, I'd be complaining. In fact, BIAB has THE BEST notation entry system I've ever used, including the dozen dedicated notation programs I've used.

I would gladly use a dedicated notation program if BIAB would cooperate. I had tried musescore a while ago, without much success. I downloaded again today, and got about the same results. I didn't see any of my lyrics, and for me thats a deal breaker. It tried to put a 3/4 song into 4/4, and balked at a couple of songs saying that it came across a 2/4 bar when it wanted a 4/4. Now the songs I loaded didn't have mixed time sigs, and I didn't have time to investigate. Now these are probably musescore problems as it is reading the native BIAB file

I always create a linear song and add repeats. Musescore, I suspect, never got any indication of the multiline requirement, but then again it didn't show any lyrics.

The output, as much as it was, looked nice, but for me at least, would not be useful.

I just keep hoping that one day we might get notation that has the same level of professionalism as RealTracks and the rest of BIAB.

Dave, I don't use lyrics but I completely understand your difficulty. Just curious, are you aware of what MuseScore calls their "nightly builds"? These are version 3 beta versions, updated almost daily. I try them periodically to see if Music XML from BIAB fares better. Give this a try. If it doesn't handle your song correctly, then make a report to MuseScore.

Here's the URL: http://prereleases.musescore.org/windows/nightly/

Thanks Matt
I must admit, I did give up on Musescore a couple of years ago. It looked good, but didn't interface well with BIAB. I also tried it when they said it read BIAB files, but it still didn't work for me. So when Mario mentioned it again, I thought it was worth another test. Nothing yet!

I'll look into the Beta version, and follow up with Musescore. As they are using the .MGU file, they should be able to extract all the notation information. When they tried to use a midi output from BIAB, there simply wasn't enough information, so as long as someone can reverse engineer the .MGU, (or PGMusic provides the file layout) getting a clean piece of notation might work. Wouldn't it be nice if all this was under the covers, and we were able to get Musescore notation without changing programs?

You have a positive plan there. It certainly would be good to get these two companies to work out bugs. Some people already think MuseScore does what they need, and it's a worthy goal to make that work for all.

+1 for sure :!

I have already posted the same idea on jan 28, 2008.

This feature would produce more professionnal score.
What a shame that it has not been implemented, 9 years later...


Sometimes, I dream that PG Music introduces some new features within an update patch. It would be a good way to add some features not requiring much developpment time.

+1

+1

I've tried Muse Score for the last 2 days. No joy. The app is messing with me! I kept trying for an "aha" moment. Not happening.

I do all my notation in Noteworthy Composer (and even though I've got most of the big boy products as well, I seem to gravitate back towards it, especially for lead sheets). It exports out to MIDI and imports nicely into BIAB. You get both notes and lyrics (not chords - I explain that more below).

It's very keyboard+mouse oriented - you use both. Using the up and down arrow keys (or the mouse, but keyboard is usually easier) to position the cursor, select a duration using (1=whole, 2=half, 3-quarter, 4-eighth, 5=sixteenth), then just press ENTER to insert a note. Press CTRL-ENTER to make it a chord with an existing note. Space bar enters a rest and tab enters a bar line; however, you don't have to necessarily worry about bar lines, as you can fix all that later and you don't have to fit everything in to a predefined bar space (until you are done and have to ensure it is done correctly).

But it's not free; it's $49. But you can get a free demo to see "how" it works functionally; you just can't save or print your work. I find I can create lead-sheets extremely quickly using it.

They also have a very friendly forum, and the company president, Eric, participates in the forum as Peter does here. It's also extensible in that people write and share tools to do things that it doesn't do natively. It's real shortfall is that it doesn't do chord symbols (per se); however, you can put chord letters above the staff as text and there is a user tool that does a pretty good job of transposing them when you need to.

I wish PGMusic and Noteworthy teamed up, as that would make an awesome product.

If you have any questions, just let me know.

Just a thought.

Thanks,John. I'll try it.

Amen. I would love to have the option to have a pickup option to help me for when I write backing tracks that start off with a pickup.