Originally Posted By: Graham Martin
.... I guess there is a belief at PG Music that the real future for BIAB is to keep producing RealTracks for the use of the single acts and deadly duos that play all the clubs these days. But I can tell you there is still a much bigger customer base of people who use BIAB to produce lead sheets for proper sized bands and orchestras and would love to do the whole arranging thing in BIAB. It is so frustrating to produce a great sounding arrangement in BIAB and then have to transfer a midi file (with accompanying bugs - more than a few, BTW) into one of the so-called proper notation programs so that you can produce the parts.....

Graham,
I completely agree with this nice summary. However I'm not a composer but an amateur jazz musician who wants to be able to fast exchange a piece of music during a jam session or rehearsel and adjust the key for the different instruments and use a proper key for the bypassing singers. So no paper or printing needed, just exchanging files on our tablets, by email or bluetooth. Then transposing it "on the spot" for your own needs. (FYI "Avid Scorch" and "MuseScore Songbook" are the apps that can "transpose" your scores + chords on the spot).

What I didn't realize is that although good notation programs excist like Sibelius, Finale and MuseScore ( btw free) that several prof composers sometimes still prefer BIAB for simple or small work.
And it seems that then, to import this stuff in their real notation program, they use a midi file exchange from BIAB. I've to say that I'm not that familiar with this type of exchange but the few times I tried it, it seemed to create a mess. So for me midi was exit right away. Also the .mgu file import option from MuseScore was a mess imho. My favourite program became PDFtoMusic Pro which produces musicXML. Then still a lot of things needed to be corrected, but after all improvements they added last year on my behalf it became very useful. So presently I only need to print BIAB to pdf, then convert it via PDFtoMusic Pro into musicXML, filter it with my own developed clean up musicXML .bat tool and do nothing else but use the results right away. No manual corrections needed for me. Ready in a few minutes.

I realize that prof composers music is generally much more complex compared to the simplified fake book stuff I'm interested in. Nevertheless I'm quite sure PDFtoMusic Pro can improve their program to an even much higher level if more problems are solved. There are 3 steps in this process. Firstly the way BIAB creates the PDF which includes optimum print settings for this process. Secondly the way PDFtoMusic converts the pdf to .musicxml. Thirdly the way your notation program including the optimum settings reads musicXML!

Since I'm pretty familiar with the problems involved I'm very interested in an example BIAB file which one of you created in BIAB and which you afterwards used to exchange with your favourite notation program. Then that created a lot of headaches I understood the way you use to do it. But still some of you seem to use BIAB for quick and dirty work.

If you send such a BIAB file to me I like to try it the way I do it, so I can experience all shortcomings myself. Then I can import it into Sibelius, import it into Finale and import it into MuseScore, print it to pdf and send it back to you as is without manually corrections. This might lead to more improvements in the whole process which might benifit all of us.

Thanks,
Rob

Musicians and music publishers are still wasting too much paper...come on men we live in the digitised age...Wake up!