PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Windows Your favorite way of making decent printed scores from BIAB?

OK, with that I completely agree. But resizing and moving is done if needed in choosing a correct template in the notation program which imports the musicXML.

I guess you mean the BIAB program code, but I think that if they can create a PDF file it can't be difficult to create a musicXML file as well! They just don't want to invest money into a new universal language which probably won't make it in the future.

But if you import a musicXML, created from a by BIAB printed PDF file converted by PDFtoMusic Pro, into a notation programs you can change, correct and add anything you like in order to create your favourite personal lay out. Only if too much work is involved to do that it isn't very useful. So if too much goes wrong during the conversion process, too much work is involved to correct all mistakes which creates much more work then the process you advices. For that reason I did add the present musicXML results in the examples if they were imported into the 3 most used notation programs in order to show what results are created.

This was done without using any favourite personal templates to show what happens with the standard used template! If you created a favourite template in your personally used notation program, you can already set a lot of font-sizes and type, chord-sizes and types, page margins and lots of other things to reflect your personal favourite lay out. Importing the musicXML will instantly show your favourite lay out in that case.

Additionally musicXML can be used in "Avid Scorch" at your iPad (if you have one). So you can transpose your music on the spot. The same applies for the "MuseScore Songbook" if you used the .mscz format. Simply import musicXML into "MuseScore" (free) and save it as .mscz.

Did you observe the printed PDF from BIAB and compare them with the PDF's from Sibelius, Finale and MuseScore? I really liked some comments on those results! see: https://www.sugarsync.com/pf/D7389688_4167795_9087518


OK, with that I completely agree as well.

However there are a lot of BIAB files around and I wanted to fill the gap to be able to import easily BIAB files into excisting notation programs which produce formats that can be used in apps used at tablets in order to have them fast available, with the great advantage you can TRANSPOSE all the music on the spot at your tablet. So I used PDFtoMusic Pro to produce musicXML. It took me last year to get Myriad so far that a lot has been improved. All excisting BIAB chords are perfectly recognized, a lot of strange mistakes have been solved, but it isn't still perfect. It serves already enough to be very useful. That's why I converted all 6000 available BIAB files to observe what happens and be able to give Myriad feed back about what still goes wrong in the conversion process.

I think that if you use a good setting during the BIAB to PDF printing process, the converted to musicXML results are good enough to be used for the majority of the files without manually applyïng any corrections. So you just import the converted MusicXML and then print them to .mxl, .sib, .mscz or PDF using your favourite template. All processes can be done in batch-mode so you can do a whole directory with .mgu files in one run printing it to PDF. Also you can use the batch-mode with PDFtoMusic. And even in Sibelius and MuseScore for print outs in your favourite format you can use a batch mode. I don't know about Finale and others.

My favourite way of making decent printed scores from BIAB is still printing it to PDF with correct print and notation window settings, converting the PDF into musicXML with PDFtoMusic Pro, importing it into Sibelius or/and MuseScore (free) using my own template and export it to my favourite formats beïng PDF, .mxl, .sib and .mscz.

Rob