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

I'm a realbook player, not an organist nor a composer. Basicly BIAB suits me. It's absolutely useless to try to upgrade BIAB to a level that comes close to any real notation program. BIAB is good enough to notate simple fake book music. But then if you want to use the notated stuff from BIAB you want to exchange it correctly with any other medium without the need to start correcting it. From my limited experience with BIAB my impression is that if you print it on paper it is OK. If you print it to PDF you get the same result, as far as I experience it. That seems OK to. So what is left is how to exchange it with a real notation program and/or with an app from a tablet.
Here we have 3 possibilities (which I know of) either using midi or musicXML or converting via the .mgu import from MuseScore. BIAB exports midi. I know what midi is but have no experience with it. From the experience I had with by exporting midi and using it as input for any othe notation or whatever program the result is barely a shadow from the original print. So you need a complete workover which is that time consuming that you better could have imported the music manually! Iow, useless imho! So what is left? Same applies for the MuseScore conversion which reads .mgu. Left is musicXML, but BIAB doesn't support it. So the next option is PDFtoMusic Pro which translates the PDF into musicXML. Almost all programs support musicXML input as does the Avid Scorch iPad app. The PDF to musicXML conversion is such a good job that most of the time I can use it without any corrections at all. I like to explain for people who are not familiar with PDF to musicXML or for the ones who have a bad experience that there are 2 kinds of PDF.'s. The ones that contain pictures which basicly are scanned and the ones that have vectorised music PDF exported from a notation program. Most PDF's contain pictures, they are very hard to convert and the results are bad, so the majority who ever tried the conversion programs easily may conclude that it is useless. However music notation programs generally properly export PDF in a vectorised musical format.
Also the BIAB PDF's are vectorised PDF's. That are PDF's that can be converted much better into musicXML. Nevertheless it is still tough and since 3 steps are involved: BIAB to PDF, PDF to musicXML and musicXML to any notation program or app. All three are prone to creating a mess if the job isn't done properly.

So PDFtoMusic Pro can only convert vectorised PDF's. Anticipating on the variëty of settings that can be used by BIAB while printing is quite impossible. So if you print you should avoid some settings. So what I do is, run the BIAB printed pdf with "optimum print settings" and use the by PDFtoMusic Pro produced musicXML as input for either Sibelius, MuseScore or directly for "Avid Scorch!". There is one note to make, afterwards I filter the musicXML for some rubbish to prevent basicly all wrongly interpreted slurs and ties and some other stuff. Everybody who wants to experiment can get my input for it.

What I don't know is what kind of BIAB notation work is around that challenges the limits of what PDFtoMusic is capable of! Therefor I used the 6000 BIAB files from the BIAB Yahoo Group as a reference to confront Myriad with what all goes wrong. I've no idea if those 6000 BIAB files can be seen as an optimum trial. Neither did I compare all 6000 musicXML output printed as PDF again with the originally scanned input from BIAB. My time is limited.
All this was done in batch-mode. It all can be found in the links I supplied. Everybody can compare them and comment. Each time when I discovered mistakes in my own files I did analyse them and tried to have Myriad to solve it. Myriad has done a hughes job but I can't expect them to solve mistakes caused by the BIAB to PDF process. The program is developed for general use and not for BIAB of course! So it is still not perfect, but it certainly is very useful imho. I'm using it every day for converting my BIAB files into musicXML ( or rather .mxl afterwards ). And it suits me doïng nothing but converting and using the results right away without correcting anything!

So who wants to supply me with (an) additional BIAB file(s) from which he thinks exchanging the way he did it ( using midi) was a hell of a job. Then I can prove that the way I do it might be very easy! I like to be able to compare and discuss the problems, so we can learn from it.

Rob