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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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Joined: Dec 2010
Posts: 71
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OP
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Posts: 71 |
I did try this great notation program, and discovered that with the good settings in BIAB I could export midi files.............. After tryïng to use midi as input for "Notion" a few times with doubtfull results I discovered a much much better methode! So forget my previous reply. The standard methode of exchanging music is the format MusicXML, but although BIAB (as far as I know) does not export XML, it exports PDF files which are containing the files in the correct format for XML. The PDF files can be easily converted into XML by e.g. the freeware version (for one page per conversion) of the program "PDFtoMusic Pro". The XML file can directly be imported (via Dropbox) into the app "Notion". The results are very good. An exact copy inclusive the chords becomes available in "Notion". The result is a directly transposable file for music and chords, which as new "Transposed PDF file" can be exported via email! The results are super! BIAB should actually add a music XML export function! Note: The XML "fake sheet mode" results are not usable but many people don't use this anyway and the advantage is that "repeats" can be added very fast in "Notion" much faster as in BIAB itself.
Musicians and music publishers are still wasting too much paper...come on men we live in the digitised age...Wake up!
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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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Joined: Dec 2004
Posts: 91
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Joined: Dec 2004
Posts: 91 |
I've been following this thread with interest as I recently bought an iPad and was hoping to use it to display my lead sheets. I decided to invest in the Notion app and was really impressed with its huge range of notation features.
So much so that over the past few days I've been trying to decide whether to invest in the PC version. To my great surprise yesterday I discovered they are having a 50% off sale on both the program and additional expansion sounds until 3rd December. The program itself already comes with over 6Gb of sampled sounds.
From what I've seen so far it's going to be a great adjunct to BIAB and Powertracks and something to keep me well and truly amused until the next release of BIAB.
Richard Williams
Sydney
Australia
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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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Joined: Jun 2005
Posts: 7,697
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BIAB should actually add a music XML export function! Stop with all the explanation points (!) and big bold statements. Just write normally like you're making a presentation in a meeting with a bunch of coworkers. We all know what you're talking about, no need to shout about it. Unless you're 15 and just can't help yourself... This is the core Wishlist item. It's been talked about for as long as I've been a member of this forum. The consensus here is Biab is a pretty old program as far as the basic coding is concerned and some of these things simply cannot be done without a complete rewrite and that is a huge task for any software company. The question then becomes is this sort of thing worth the development cost? Will it really propel PG Music to the next level or will they lose big? None of us have any idea about that. Bob
Biab/RB latest build, Win 11 Pro, Ryzen 5 5600 G, 512 Gig SSD, 16 Gigs Ram, Steinberg UR22 MkII, Roland Sonic Cell, Kurzweil PC3, Hammond SK1, Korg PA3XPro, Garritan JABB, Hypercanvas, Sampletank 3, more.
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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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Joined: Nov 2013
Posts: 58
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I've been following this thread with interest as I recently bought an iPad and was hoping to use it to display my lead sheets. ... For displaying music score sheet, I recommend "forScore" for the iPad. It's only $7.00 and you can store a ton of songs according to genres or other filing method. I use a foot pedal "air play" to turn the pages. Works great! Wally G
Yamaha Montage 6 Roland J80, D50, Integra 7, BK-7m, FR-8X, 1967 Fender Jaguar, Fender Strat, Fender 1965 Twin Reverb reissue, Selmer Trumpet, Akai EWI, Studio One 4 My WEB Site: www.gontowski.com/music
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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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Joined: Dec 2010
Posts: 71
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OP
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Joined: Dec 2010
Posts: 71 |
....rewrite and that is a huge task.... May be, but looking to the effort they put in every new release it is a piece of cake in my opinion...If you can generate a PDF file it's just another "simple translation" to an XML file. The real problem seems to me that the music XML format is not implemented correctly or completely nor by PDFtoMusic or by Notion which will result in e.g. reading C7 instead of CMaj7 and C7 instead of C7b9 or C7#9. And C instead of Csus. My experience with programs like Sibelius and Finale is zero, but my experience with Notion is growing every day. I have been anylizing what happens with the generated XML files from BIAB pdf's by MuseScore and PDFtoMusic if they are used as input for Notion. I use just one page files filled with single staves, 8-15 systems with mostly 4 measures (or 5 with lead in) each, since that's how most of my BIAB files are built up. I tried to figure out what goes wrong and why it goes wrong. For that I studied the XML files and look how they did translate all the chords translations. To understand the proces I used as reference the standard from musicxml.com/for-developers/ defined in musicxml30.zip (see file: direction.mod) For me it is important that I get an almost a 1:1 result compared to the original BIAB pdf if I export the Notion results as pdf file for use in forScore or iGigBook or any other pdf reader. Having that result, in Notion on the spot any file can be transposed including the chords to any key and you can send the result as pdf file to yourself (by email) or a colleague musician. How easy it can be! So what did I notice? 1. First of all the job done by PDFtoMusic is great for notes after importing it in Notion, but not perfect. It includes basic chords and some of the other text-like stuff like title, tempo and remarks. I had far less problems with PDFtoMusic correcting notes then with the MuseScore results directly generated from .mgu files. Notes from PDF2Music are perfectly reproduced, only some red 'extra notes' will pop-up in Notion showing a conflict due to missing ties between notes. But the corrections are very fast to implement in Notion. After that a perfect 1:1 result is available concerning the note representation. Chords are a different issue. In principle the simple chords are all correct. But many possible chords additions are not interpreted by PDFtoMusic. MuseScore does a perfect job, they seem to be specialized in recognizing BB chords. However none of the chords additions are read by Notion. So in fact this perfect translation does not help a lot. Many chords with additions are not translated by PDFtoMusic. However adding and changing some chords is an easy task in Notion. 2. Notion cannot interprete there own generated extra chords additions after exporting it as XML. Those additions are also not read by Notion anyway from other XML files. So chords like C7b9 and C#b9 are not read by Notion but all translated into C7. Notion reads "major-seventh" as C7 while it should read CMaj7 which is a basic mistake. Notion interprets "major-minor" as CMaj7 while it should read CmMaj7. So CmMaj7 cannot be interpreted by Notion. Since CMaj7 is used a lot in all XML I replace automatically "major-seventh" by "major-minor". That's saving a lot of work in the corrections. 3. The job from MuseScore XML for notes was too bad for Notion (all separeted notes in Notion), no text like tempo and remarks is translated so it was not interesting for me to investigate this any further. Additionally the batch job which can be used in PDFtoMusic is great for converting a whole directory with BIAB pdf's! This are my first impressions. From this forum I hope to learn a few things: 1: Are there other (better?) PDF to XML programs worth tryïng which might interprete both notes and chords better? 2: Does anyone have similar experiences? And/or really use XML translations a lot with good results? Conclusion: Using PDFtoMusic to translate the whole directory with all my BIAB pdf files into XML is just one press of a button. Using a "find and replace program" can prepare all XML files for a better Notion result concerning CMaj7 with, again with one press of a button. All XML files can easily be imported via Dropbox into Notion. Then a check and correction is needed for each file correcting some chords with additions. Deleting sometimes some red marked notes. Adding several new note ties and deleting the short BIAB note ties which are wrongly translated into a mercato or fermata above notes. All corrections are pretty easy and fast to implement. The results are on the spot transposable files at your iPad for notes and chords.
Musicians and music publishers are still wasting too much paper...come on men we live in the digitised age...Wake up!
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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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Joined: May 2000
Posts: 38,502
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Joined: May 2000
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IME, NOTHING is "simple" when coding or recoding. The only time such is considered to be "simple" is when the Sales Guy brings up an idea. Like the fellow that wanted us to add a bit of "simple" code that would allow cellphones to "see through the ground and thus detect land mines". We'll make a fortune, dontcha know.  Gee, why didn't I thinka that. --Mac
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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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Joined: Dec 2010
Posts: 71
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OP
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Joined: Dec 2010
Posts: 71 |
After some experiments I found an almost perfect manner to get my BIAB files at the iPad with notes and chords directly available for transposing on the spot. The only app I know which shows a very good picture ( much better then Notion which I mentioned earlier in the discussion) is "Avid Scorch". Avid Scorch is capable of transposing .sib files with music notes and chords on the spot. Of course Sibelius files can only be created by the Sibelius notation program so that's the one you need to get first. You can try it for free for a month: ( http://www.sibelius.com/download/index.html ) How to get your BIAB files into Sibelius? BIAB files can be printed to PDF. PDF files can be converted by PDFtoMusic Pro into XML. ( http://www.myriad-online.com/cgi-bin/download.pl?prod=PDFP&lang=EN ). For one page the program is free. Most of my BIAB files I try to print at one page anyway, with a maximum of 14 or 15 staves. In a few cases I used the Leadsheet Prints by adding repeats etc. to reduce the number of staves if it is larger then 14. You need to add the repeats in Sibelius. The program "PDFtoMusic Pro" does a pretty good job to create very usable XML files. The best results for me was using chords in "Arial Narrow" in BIAB. Some chords were not correctly translated so I wrote a "find and replace" .bat file using the free fnr.exe ( http://findandreplace.codeplex.com ) which created the right corrections in the XML files for wrongly translated chords. PDFtoMusic Pro is making a beta version with suggested corrections ( not yet available ). Since my .bat file works as a batch file you can correct a whole directory full with XML files in one run if you want. Apart from the chord corrections I introduced a whole bunch of changes and corrections in the XML file. That sets all the parameters in the XML file to create a directly usable 1 page .sib file which hardly needs any corrections and many timse even no corrections at all to get a perfect .sib file identical to the original pdf file from BIAB. The only thing you need to do is to set the character size of the chords to an appropriate size for perfect reading. The main extra changes in the XML file created by the .bat file is setting page margins, size text positions, stave positions and chord positions such, that the whole iPad screen is 100% used and chords are positioned correctly above the notes and additionally no strange credit-words are messing up the page anymore. Also some ties are detected as slurs. Some short ties are detected as fermata's or articulations like staccato, accents, etc. Also ties can be detected as notes. All backup notes I saw were all mistakenly recognized due to ties. The backup notes themself are never recognized. So all that stuff has been changed into comments. All mentioned corrections are automatically implemented by the .bat file in one run. Right now the .bat file runs some 20 "find and replace" actions to make the XML file suitable for Avid Scorch at the iPad. I used it already for 100 or more files with excellent results. 3 examples of original BIAB pdf files side by side (on PC only)with the Avid Scorch SIB files (light yellow background) can be found here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17816826/Compare%20BIABpdf2SIB.pdfOne single page file, One lead sheet page file and one 4 page file from the Real Book from BIAB. The bat file which filters the XML file before feeding it into Sibelius can be found here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17816826/P2M-XMLtoSIB-XML.bat.txtSince in Avid Scorch no annotations or notes can be written the next step is, after having transposed to the wanted instrument key, to make a screen photo from the Avid Scorch result. Then use the "Photo to PDF" app to convert the screen photo to PDF, give it a song name and open the PDF in forScore or any other PDF reading program where you want to organize your files and can edit them and/or put annotations to the files. This conversion to pdf can be done at your iPad and takes less then 1 minute. In other words all my BIAB files which previously were printed only in PDF for use at my iPad are now additionally converted into .sib files, which takes me only a few minutes more. Both files are stored in Dropbox. Both files can be opened from Dropbox at the iPad and can be used as needed anywhere in a gig. Transposing can be done on the spot and send to anyone's iPad either by e-mail, Bluetooth or AirDrop. For those who are curious how easy it really functions and want to try it, I created a PDF file which shows the iPad steps in the in more detail. Tryïng will cost you only a few box for the 2 app's "Avid Scorch" and "Photo to PDF" for the iPad and downloading Sibelius and PDFtoMusic Pro at your PC is free.. Dropbox import and Transposing and converting to a PDF copy for any other music application is shown here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17816826/Import%20and%20Transpose.pdfLet me know if you experience problems or need more detailed information.
Last edited by robvh; 01/21/14 04:25 AM.
Musicians and music publishers are still wasting too much paper...come on men we live in the digitised age...Wake up!
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Band-in-a-Box® 2026 for Windows® Special Offers Extended Until January 15, 2026!
Good news! You still have time to upgrade to the latest version of Band-in-a-Box® for Windows® and save. Our Band-in-a-Box® 2026 for Windows® special now runs through January 15, 2025!
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Happy New Year!
Thank you for being part of the Band-in-a-Box® community.
Wishing you and yours a very happy 2026—Happy New Year from all of us at PG Music!
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Wishing everyone a happy, healthy holiday season—thanks for being part of our community!
The office will be closed for Christmas Day, but we will be back on Boxing Day (Dec 26th) at 6:00am PST.
Team PG
Band-in-a-Box 2026 Video: The Newly Designed Piano Roll Window
In this video, we explore the updated Piano Roll, complete with a modernized look and exciting new features. You’ll see new filtering options that make it easy to focus on specific note groups, smoother and more intuitive note entry and editing, and enhanced options for zooming, looping, and more.
Watch the video.
You can see all the 2026 videos on our forum!
Band-in-a-Box 2026 Video: AI Stems & Notes - split polyphonic audio into instruments and transcribe
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You can see all the 2026 videos on our forum!
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