BiaB has many powerful features but we all know that notation is not amongst them . I still need a notation program to give the lead sheets the final touch (I use Finale PrintMusic). Exchange of stuff between the two programs would be greatly enhanced by the support of MusicXML in BiaB. MusicXML includes many features (chord symbols, text elements, repeat signs, to name a few) which MIDI does not. I'd love to see MusicXML import and export in one of the nxt releases of BiaB.

Thanks for considering
Heinz ....

+1

Music XML export from BIAB, certainly. That would help a lot.

This has been discussed here in the past. Peter Gannon commented that it would be a good feature to have. That was maybe two years ago, and I don't recall it being mentioned more than once since.

ps Welcome to the forum!

I can't quite tell from the avatar, but is that a Monette mouthpiece you're playing on? I'm a brass player, too (I use Warburton mouthpieces).

Hi Matt,

Thanks for commenting. On the moutpiece: It's quite a while this foto has been taken, I guess I still played the "Yamaha 'Bobby Shew' Lead". These days I am playing Marcinkiewicz E14.1 (fairly wide and shallow cup).

Regards, Heinz ...

Add my vote, please, for XML.

It is a real shame not to have such a useful feature that should be fairly easy to add on. It could make BiaB attractive to a new type of customer -- one who isn't interested now, because the printed output is sub-professional.

I'm not so sure it would be easy. During beta testing of Encore 5, a notation program I've used for twenty years, there were several discussions with the developers about the difficulties of implementation. The end result was a partial implementation, with bugs.

+1

Indeed a missing feature by nowadays standards...

Teo

One of the cool new things about NoteWorthy Composer 2 (the notation program) is the "user tools" feature. It's currently limited to single staffs (but that may change), but it lets you copy everything (or a snippet) from a staff to the clipboard as textual representations of what NWC displays and interprets on the staff. User tools let you take that information from the clipboard and write whatever program you want to around it and either use it externally, or paste the changes back to the staff. For example, NWC doesn't natively support chord notation, so we have to implement it as text elements. That's fine until you decide to transpose to a different key. Transposing the notes and key signature is not a problem (it does it automatically), but the textual chord letters obviously stay the same. So one enterprising coder wrote a user tool to transpose those textual chord entries. One command and now the chord entries you typed in match the notes you just transposed.

Likewise, there is also a user tool to create a MusicXML export of what's on the staff, which can then be imported into other programs that understand the MusicXML format.

User tools has really opened NWC up to new features that otherwise would not be available. There are now several new features to the program that didn't come from the developer, but from the users themselves.

Maybe Lawrie can chime in, as I believe he has done some user tools himself.

G'day John,
drop me in it why doncha?

Lots of user developed tools, perhaps too many to mention quickly, and all oriented towards the notation side of things of course. My favourites are:
Global_Mod
Parts
Transpose Text chord
MakeChord
MultiBar Rest
and the ever useful Variable Dump.

The names are pretty self explanatory but if anyone wants additional details, just ask.

As for MusicXML, there are a couple of options, but the most promising opportunity in this direction is the implementation of the nwctxt format. This is an export file from NWC2 that contains a textual version of the complete NWC work. It is not limited to a single staff. This text file can be manipulated in any way the user wants, using simple things like a search and replace with a text editor to programs designed to manipulate the file according to specific rules. This could easily be used to create a MusicXML transfer utility. I believe there are a couple of users already looking into this. For myself, my meager programming skills aren't up to it.

There is already one MusicXML import utility that works quite well, but this tool does not need the nwctxt file. Rather it was created before that file format was defined and creates the work directly into an open instance of NWC2. I've often used it to import from MusicXML files created by SharpeEye 2.

Normal user tools can be written in any language capable of running in console mode. To my knowledge tools have been written in Perl, php, python, VBScript (WScript), JScript, java, and there's even one that has been compiled into an executable.

At least one user copies to TSE (The Semware Editor, the successor to QEdit) and then uses preprogrammed macros to manipulate the text and then copies the result back into NWC2.

Sorry, Lawrie, forgot about NWCTXT format. I was thinking more about the clipboard format. But for both, it opens a lot of opportunities for folks to create their own utilities, features, and capabilities.

It would be nice if other music applications had a similar facility. That would go a long way towards bridging the gap between different applications.

I hope this is the right place to vote on a wishlist item. I'd also like to ask for an XML import to BIAB. Then I could read Finale leadsheet files, add my own solos, and create notation for everything.