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

You make a good point about Ipad notation viewing Rob. Paperless Books are already widely used (Kindle etc), but unfortunately the machines are not really big enough for reading notation, its only a matter of time that this becomes standard.
I once helped an orchestra keep tabs on its music, its really tough, do you have enough copies for that 2nd trombone, did the solo violin part actually get returned? Is it OK to simply photocopy in an institution? (Not in UK schools) . Also, as you get older its harder to see in the dark. Those music stand lights are so so, much better to have hte score backlit, resizable etc.

Its now feasible for everyone to have their own cheap large tablet sat on their music stand, and to distribute the music via network/dropbox

Z

I had one of the first "iRex" 9.7 inch e-readers, but the company went bankrupt. It was before the iPad came along. Very nice for music reading, only the hardware was too slow and unreliable. Today you can buy several 9.7 inch e-readers which will be much better but they probably cannot compete with an iPad anyway.
May be I'll try one for outdoors sunny day gigs where you have a problem with reading an iPad.

Rob

Yes Rob, I don't think that many ereaders cope with all lighting conditions, but the backlit ones do, better than tablets- or at least conventional tablets.

On the subject of notation, its something I have thought about a lot. To develop a full blown notation program for BIAB seems to me to be unfeasible because there are so many special requirements. For example, adding a gracenote can throw out the rest of the bar's timing if is not treated as having no 'time segment' then there are things like the rules for direction of stems, placement of staccato and accents, ties and slurs, appoggiaturas, not to mention the specialised symbols required for specific instruments - e.g. pedal points. It's all far too complex to provide as an 'additional feature'. Where to draw the line, for a 'basic' notation package, is very hard to decide, it depends on your preferences as a musician, its different if you are a church organist as opposed to a realbook player

My view is that if BIAB can provide a lead sheet this is good enough, as long as one can export the MIDI and work on it elsewhere if desired. I would be happy with read only notation. (IMO)

10 inches (IPAD)....would be a bit small for my eyes, I would need a 14 inch screen at least.

Z

Hi Bob, be aware that there are Rumours that Sibelius may be in its last incarnation. All the developers are working for Steinberg I believe.

Z

Thanks, and yes I've heard that as well. After posting my earlier comment about using Sibelius, I had second thoughts (and a look at my wallet), and decided to give Musescore more careful scrutiny. The new beta version of Musescore seems to fill my needs for now, so I am going to work with it for a while.

BTW, this has been a very interesting and informative discussion. Thanks to all who posted their comments.


Bob

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

To experiment yourself with creating musicXML from BIAB I did write a "Quick and Dirty" manual wich includes links to all the programs you need to start your experiments. It's all free downloadable. Also more details are given if you want to adopt the methode.
BIAB2musicXML MANUAL.pdf - download at: https://www.sugarsync.com/pf/D7389688_4167795_9082656
Enjoy music,
Rob

Good points Rob

Last week the app "MuseScore Songbook" added the property "Original" for the sizes in which music is displayed. Additionally any size can be choosen.
This is really great news for any tablet user, iPad and Androïd oriënted tablets. With "Original" (now the default) the music is shown as printed from the notation program, which means honoring the original number of measures per line.

Then of course remember this app can 'transpose" your music on the spot!

(For creating files: BIAB to PDF, then PDF to MusicXML, then MusicXML to .mscz. Mscz is the format you need for your app! Use PDFtoMusic Pro for conversion to MusicXML and MuseScore for conversion to .mscz, if problems let me know)
Rob

Funny, I was thinking of this thread because yesterday I had a rehearsal for a gig this Friday where we have a different bass player and he needed 4 charts. Luckily these individual tunes fit on one page with no 1st/2nd endings or codas. I printed them from Biab and for one I just handwrote, "tag the last 4 and end".

I also did a big band gig last Saturday for the first time in months and it struck me how big those charts are. I didn't measure them but they're bigger than standard and this illustrates the problem with using tablets. They've been making big band charts that big for years because on dark stages using stand lights players of all ages and eyesight abilities have to be able to read them easily. an iPad would be out of the question and even a bigger full size tablet might not be too good either.

I just did a quick search and it seems the standard big band orchestra size paper is 9.5 X 12.5". At least in the US.

For me if I'm doing a standard small group jazz gig I can read a basic real book type chart on a 10" (diagonal) tablet but for something else where I really need to read some notation along with the chords that's too small. I still need my minimum 8.5 X 11" paper.

Bob

Bob,
I do understand your concerns. But I like to add several remarks. Standard in Europe we use A4 ( ca 8.2" x 11.6"). Subtract the free edges and the really used spaces for music is 7.5" x 9.5". But on an iPad you use the max available screen space 5.8" x 7.8". This is 26% smaller then A4. In practice if you size the chords 26% larger the chords size is about the same as on paper if you wish. Then if more pages are needed you may need a foot pedal. Then iPad seems to launch a larger 12" screen version ( http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/ipad/ipad-pro-plus-release-date-rumours-force-touch-poll-ios-9-run-osx-3492180/ ). Then larger screens exist as well (http://mashable.com/2014/08/19/fuhu-big-tablet/ ).

Basicly many especially older people do have all kind of reasons not to switch to paperless music reading, since any new technique needs a learning curve (I'm 76 and more then happy with my iPad). Nevertheless I just notice that also in the professional music business for both classical and entertainment music, iPad's and alikes are used everywhere. In the Netherlands I should say about 30% of the musicians is already using it. No printing, directly exchange any music, transpose it for your instrument or the singers voice, etc.etc. Correcting, erasing, you name it. Don't miss the boat!!

My concern that iPad was the only one which had a decent music reading (and writing/correcting) tool(s) is slowly vapourating. The "MusicScore Songbook" is available for iPad and any Androïd tablet. I'm still waiting for "ForScore" to enter the OS Androïd market.

Rob

Things are coming along no doubt. If I'm familiar with some tune but don't have it memorized like what happened a few years ago when a sax player sat in, he pulled it up on his phone using iRealB, put it on my stand and I could read it ok. But that's because it was another standard AABA jazz tune that I sort of knew but not quite, you know?

But take something that's more modern and certainly not standard like some Lorber tunes such as Watersign or Toads Place. I'm supposed to catch those fully written out keyboard parts and no way could I do that on even an 8" screen. I need my full size black on white fake book chart with lots of light.

I keep checking up on this stuff by reading threads like this and talking to other players. Yes, I've seen a good number using their iPads on stage but again, they're 99% standard stuff that they already pretty much know. They're just using the iPad as a memory crutch. But I've talked about this, if somebody calls a more complicated tune that they've never heard of much less played before, then you could have a problem reading that because you have to be able to see the notation clearly and for that you need your full size fake book.

The other thing of course is the cost. The largest tablets are not cheap when I already have all the books.

But on my third (or fourth?) other hand the idea of having my 1,000's of charts digitized and inside a nice sized device is very appealing.

I know I'll get there eventually.

Bob

Bob,
Since you mentioned some examples like Watersign and Toad's Place, it made me curious to see what exactly you are referring to. So I searched for both songs available in my iGigBook library at the iPad, which contains some 160 books including the Classical Real Book Vol ll C, Bb or Eb versions which contain both songs. I copied both into "ForScore", sized the pages to maximum and asked myself "can I read this easily?" The screen size of the standard iPad is 9.7" ( not 8"), the readibility of mentioned files is perfect (even when not resized it was already good enough). No offense, but you need to be pretty blind if you can't read it, unless you wanted both pages at one screen ( both songs contain 2 pages). So for me paging can easily be done manually, although a foot pedal may make it probably easier. This is a matter of taste. Paging manually is so quick and easy that I ( as a keyboard player ) can do it without a foot pedal anyway.
I always copy found pages from "iGigBook" into "ForScore" since this app has all the possibilities like making corrections, notations and, resizing, organizing, etc.etc. like anything you can do with paper sheets and more.
No offense again, but your examples didn't make much sense to me. Then of course you need to buy an iPad if you haven't one already. If you have one I can help you (anybody) to get started and have your 1.000's of charts very quickly.

Rob