PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Windows BIAB2pdf2xml2iPad direct transpose scores and chords at your iPad!

My experiences to create BIAB files as directly transposable files which includes scores and chords at my iPad are fabulous. Although a directly musicxml export from BIAB were preferrable, the view steps in between which I do now are a very good and fast alternative. The app which is displayïng the results can be found in the App store as "Avid Scorch" ( only a few bucks). The display results are awesome and the direct transpose function to any key also. As well the XML as the .sib files from Sibelius can directly be imported from e.g. Dropbox or whatever cloud. The .sib file is preferred since it produces an almost identical copy of the original, uses the whole iPad screen and can be set to produce larger font-sizes for chords.

Some example results can be found here:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17816826/Compare%20BIABpdf2SIB.pdf
Scrolling down the white page is the original BIAB pdf file followed each time by the "Avid Scorch" iPad (darker background, iPad sized ) results of some abritary examples.

An additional example complexer page showing the difference between XML and .sib in "Avid Scorch" import is here:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17816826/Days%20Of%20Wine%20and%20Roses%2C%20The%20%28all%29.pdf
Scrolling down the first (smaller) file is the original exported BIAB pdf, second the .sib import and thirdly the XML import. (Copy link)

The first step is printing your file to pdf. The settings of your printing are important since the XML conversion process should not be disturbed by chords that are cluttering together excisting of large root fonts and small added suffix fonts and/or more (4) chords in a measure. So using a small font setting of say 18 rather then the default 24 is important.

The pdf files can be converted by PDFtoMusic Pro. The (free trial) PDFtoMusic 1.4.2d Beta 1 version will convert 1 page at the time, which is for many people already sufficiënt. The new beta version which is capable to transfer all available BIAB chords can be found here for downloading ( copy link):
http://www.myriad-online.com/cgi-bin/bbs/YaBB.pl?board=pdftomusic;action=display;num=1389372274

It may be still not perfect but it will become perfect later on. To make it perfect for me (and you) now already I developed a "find and replace" .bat file which is used to correct a few chords, deletes and corrects false interpretations, and sizes the file to exactly fit the iPad. I tried it for the 384 files from Real Book for BIAB which I'm using as a trial. I do it all in a batch process! For printing to pdf, I use "Print multiple songs", for converting to XML I used the Batch-process of PDFtoMusic and ultimately the .bat file does automatically run the whole directory with XML results.

Sibelius 7 can be downloaded and used for free for one month to create your .sib files after you must be a bit more creative. ( http://www.sibelius.com/cgi-bin/download/get.pl?com=sh&prod=sibdemo ).

The .bat file that does implement all changes can be found here (updates possible):
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17816826/P2M-XMLtoSIB-XML.bat.txt
The file runs with fnr.exe see: http://findandreplace.codeplex.com

An example .sib file from Days Of Wine And Roses which directly can be imported in Avid Scorch can be found here (copy link):
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17816826/Days%20Of%20Wine%20and%20Roses%2C%20The%20%28P2M-filtered%29.sib

If you struggle with the process of importing files into Avid Scorch the sequence shown here might help:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17816826/Import%20and%20Transpose.pdf

Have fun.

Interesting work here. I will look with more depth later.

What's happening in, for example, bar 9 of Family Joy with either doubled enharmonic notes or grace notes - hard to tell what's intended?

And have you experimented with the Music XML produced in BIAB 2014 by Sinsy? It's melody only, no chords either, but perhaps combining this with MuseScore or other might work?

Creating a correct XML from a pdf file by analyzing the pdf is a difficult task for any program. Normally a lot of touch-up has to be done afterwards. I'm not familiar with all programs that can do this conversion since it is a hughes task to compare them all. The main issue is that I wanted a program that converts scores and chords as well, and do it without any mistakes of course. I did some work with Fotoscore and MuseScore but I was very quickly convinced they both make such a mess of it and needed so much touch-up afterwards that PDFtoMusic was really heaven compared to that, not to say 10 times better. The only thing is that their chords detection was not complete nor correct but they did listen to me and implemented suggested improvements in the beta version. The goal is to do no touch-up at all because otherwise you soon come to a point that the touch-up work becomes as much work as notating the scores yourself from the beginning. So it is better to use an already very good program, learn what goes wrong and discover why it goes wrong and then try to convince the makers to implement suggested improvements.

So yes you discovered a glitch in Family Joy (I will look into it specificly) and no I don't intend to look to any other program and certainly not if separated tasks are needed for scores and chords. The PDFtoMusic people are willing to implement improvements and the beta version does already a good job. I did specificly test it as batch jobs on a whole list (384) of BIAB files to be able to discover all problems involved. My goal is to end up with nothing else then one reliable conversion from BIAB pdf file into a perfect Avid Scorch copy.
As it is now (with my .bat correction file), I'm so close that I already convert every file I use for Avid Scorch since it is hardly extra work but only a few more clicks on my PC and I'm ready.

Matt I'm looking forward to more comments from you and more people who may start to use it. May be some more explanation is needed around the use of the .bat file. Any help is welcome.

P.S.
I did look into A Family Joy and remembered I was surprised about the complexity of how the song has been written (I am just an amateure musician). The short and bad translation of ties from BIAB mgu to pdf causes ties to be detected as triangles. I did delete those in the .bat file. I also did mess around in the Sibelius result to add ties, but didn't succeed. That's the reason of the odd bar 9. Still not a bad result I think for this file.

(What I really like to know is how can you set a different number of bars for different systems in BIAB as shown in this file?? I like to do that all the time but never succeeded! )

Since I'm curious I downloaded BIAB 2014 and looked into Sinsy. But this is some musicXML just generated for a simple single note melody line for singers which has really nothing to do with reproducing an usefull music piece which is an identical copy of the original pdf file printed by BIAB. The files I open in "Avid Scorch" are identical copies created with very little effort, showing all notes including chords better then MuseScore and fully transposable.

Robvh, I just had a chance to experiment with the beta PDF to MusicXML utility.

Wow!

This has a lot of potential and already works great on my own music that was converted to PDF. I'm going to do a lot more experimenting now...

Matt,
I just can't wait for your comments. Do you have already done some more experiments?

The new option in BIAB 2014 with slashes into empty bars does completely mess up the results. So make sure it's off when printing to pdf.

Rob