PG Music Home Forums PG Music Wishlists Band-in-a-Box Wishlist A 2nd Chord symbols export idea.

Hi,


-----------
Update added Jan 06 2021 - bowlesj

I appreciate everyone's attempts to help in the posts below and I feel I learned a few interesting things. However the experience has actually strengthened my belief that it is a lot more efficient for (one PG-Music programmer who really knows what they are doing and who probably has portions of the logic already written) to put in the feature requested in this first post rather than have who knows how many users trying to program work around code which additionally will be much less efficient when completed than what I am wishing for in this post. In view of this I feel PG-Music will save themselves a lot of time by not bothering to read beyond this post. I will add one more thing. After creating the wish list item I actually had the need for manually creating an Audacity Label track with a few chord symbols. So I believe this feature will not get used a lot but it will get used now and then. However since I can't predict my ideas in the future it would be handy if I could list in this post any new ideas I get for using such a label track to Audacity (I have a way to remind myself to make these updates). Any such ideas could be links directly to posts added to this thread so there is both a summary at the top and an notice of a useful addition occurring (these ideas would help with creating these links). My listing new ideas for using these DAW Chord symbol labels might even get others submitting ways they could use it.

-----------


This link takes you directly to a feature in BIAB 2021 that allows one to drag chord symbols into a DAW such as Audacity to be put on a label track that one could have sitting beside a click track (which I often create in Audacity to see the bars and beats).

I think it makes a lot of sense to copy this feature (in check box form) to the attached screen which I use to export the individual tracks to .wav files to be zipped into a file to be sent to my Jazz Jams Club members so they can do their own mix it they wish using any DAW of their choice. The members get a file that unzips to create a Song Name Folder with all the associated files in it. So the checkbox might be described as "Export Chord symbols for a DAW label track".

Thanks,
John

This is already possible in BIAB, although broken in the current version. And it is not a one step operation as you are apparently proposing here. I can tell you this is very doable in the BIAB-VST 2021 and is my preferred workflow.

I have asked for this so many times over the many years.
Make sure you have the # Ticks before chord change to 0

If you had BB21 you simply open the SGU in the Biab Lite Standalone and drag the chord midi markers out.

If you have an older version of Biab you can drop the BB Chord Output midi file into Reaper and it will write the midi chord makers in the file so the others in the group can read the chords in their DAW.

You can also save as musicxml and drop that in Reaper and it will create midi chord markers.

Another way is save to youtube video and convert to mp4 video and send that to them as most DAWs will have a video track.

Sorry Guys, just to be clear, what I am doing now is exporting the BIAB tracks out to 5 .wav files (one for each of Bass, Drums, Piano, Guitar & Melody). These of course can be zipped and sent to the jam mates and once uncompressed they drag the files into Audacity or Reaper or GarageBand or whatever. Works great (sounds like BIAB). My Understanding is this new BIAB 2021 feature is suppose to be able to send the Chord symbols (Cmi, G7, whatever) directly to a DAW (not to a file first) and it will create a label track so you can see (Cmi, G7, whatever) along side the other tracks.

So I used the 3 things I was told as the first two pictures show and I got what the 3rd picture shows (no cigar - sounds terrible, no chord symbols). What I hope to get is in the 4th picture which I made up manually from within Audacity.

If you are not aware of it you can right click on the picture and click "Open image ...." or "View Image..." and get a bigger image you can read.

When I drag the Midi file with chord markers into Audacity I not sure how you get the markers to labels.
In Reaper it's no problem.

You can get the chord from the musicxml in Reaper and save that to a midi file that you can include with the BB tracks to give them the marker in the DAWs.

Thanks Pipeline,

Considering the current process I am using is working okay for myself and the club members (as you can hear from this AudioMack link), Getting Reaper and learning it for this one limited use isn't really worth it. But you guys have been helpful in that it forced me to create a proper picture for this wish list entry to show what is happening and what I wish for. I think it is best to just leave it out there and see what happens. Seeing as Audacity is free it won't cost PG-Music much to test it :-)

I need to create a reminder entry to keep looking at the new BIAB release features so I will be more motivated to upgrade. I wish their new release emails had "BIAB 2022: 2 of your wishes have come true + 50 new styles you typically use + 30 new features you might use.." in the subject line and in the email body I get three links right up front I can click on that take me directly to the details. Now this is a wish that PG-Music should put in (exactly what a busy person would want). Their current emails don't inspire me to read them because I think "a bunch of features I will never use". They need to fix their marketing here (get the programmers on this).

John

bowlesj,

I use Audacity and like it. Audacity is easy and fun audio software but Audacity has VERY limited midi capability. As can be seen in +++ THIS +++ Audacity help file the sole intent is to visually compare a midi track to an audio track. Audacity can not read midi file metadata such as chords.

Thanks Jim.

So I guess I need to submit a wish list item to the Audacity forum as well or else maybe remove this wish list item (not sure it I can do that). It's not a really important wish. My prior wish I consider a more important.

John

If you want to get the chord Labels into Audacity the labels are simple txt files
start time sec - start time sec - name



Biab will export to ABC Notation txt
a script could be made to convert the ABC into Audacity Labels just so long as there are no tempo changes.
z8 = L: x 8 so 8 1/8 and you get the time by calculating the tempo and beats.

Thanks Pipeline, it seems like you are also a programmer as am I. I am not familiar with the language of your code. Of the 17 programming languages I have worked with over the years, right now I only use MS-Access, Multicharts power language, PHP & JavaScript. I am swamped in Market Trading' Jazz jams Club and guitar. I am falling behind on these :-) I won't be learning any more languages. Maybe PG-Music or The Audacity folk can use some help (Audacity wiki link for developers).

John

Here, try this.
Remove the .mp4 from the script and load it in Reaper
Biab File > Save Special > Music XML
Drag XML into Reaper
select item and run script
copy text from console
save as Audacity Chord Labels.txt
Audacity Import > Label.

If that works for you, it can be changed to write direct to text file.

But there is good news! Audacity track labels can be imported and exported as ... wait for it ... text files! Audacity has two types of labels, point labels and range labels. Each label is composed of one line of text that consists of a start point, end point and text.

Test it for yourself. Add a label track to an existing project. Use Ctrl + B to insert a point. Enter some text into the point textbox. Export the label track. The exported file saves as a text box. Open the text file and you'll see one line of text with two coordinates and the label text.

Oh Gee...lol. What the hey...lol. Lets try it.

Thanks Jim. I tried your suggestion and I pulled up a song in Audacity and exported a label.txt file. I deleted the label and imported the txt file and the label track appeared again. Cool!

Thanks Pipeline. I figured out what you abc file was and I did the abc export for a song (see png picture). I have the abc below. It is a lot more complex than your example.

I might be able to write an MS-Access script to create an Audacity label.txt file for the song. I don't have reaper. Forget Reaper. The question is when will I get the time to do this...lol. I have 8 songs on my club's Jam Schedule that I need to record my guitar parts for so we can get the songs up on AudioMack to add to the 19 we have done already (I am the "John Guitar" guy). I will put it on my to-do list :-) Another challenge. No promises :-)

Programming thoughts:
The | lines represent the bars.
The " double quotes isolate the chord symbols.
The : colons show the chorus
The loop code to start with for analyzing each line is below.
We probably can figure out the coordinates from the Q:1/4=153 and M:4/4.
The program asks for the number of chorus repeats.
Piece of cake...lol. Famous last words :-) I know form 40 years of programming there will be surprises.
The PG-Music programmers might have this done before me especially considering the other club members are waiting :-)



Modify this code to figure out each line of data.

Just download Reaper and you will have it.
https://www.reaper.fm/files/6.x/reaper619_x64-install.exe
I just made the script up to do what you need.

When you export the ABC choose an empty track and just export the Chords without notation. And Unfold it first.

Another way..
Drop your SGU MGU onto charttranslate.exe
and it will create "Song name.mjb"
open it with Notepad

Thanks Pipeline, as I indicated although programming this would be fun and interesting this project will have to wait. The recordings and trading are top priority. 19 recordings have been completed successfully since March indicating the future recordings are not in jeopardy without the chord symbols in the label track. Delaying to work on this project creates a problem.

Sorry I thought you wanted to send the guys a midi chord marker file and an Audacity text Chord Label with the Biab tracks so they can record in any DAW or Audacity.
As I said Reaper will do all this for you instantly.

Yes, but I left out the fact that I am behind on 8 songs I have to record. I also have no interest in learning Reaper.

I was more interested in this as a useful feature that also provides an added reason to upgrade from BIAB 2016 to 2021 but it makes even more sense for BIAB to add a check box to the dialog box in my first post. After all if they have the code to drag and drop directly to any DAW all this is doing is an export to memory and triggering an input inside the daw as what appears to be one step but is in fact those two steps (there is a name for this - I think it is called dynamic data exchange). So it is not going to be that hard for PG-Music to add that checkbox and have it trip off that export function they already wrote but instead write to a file rather than memory (they already have the logic coded up to prepare the data for the dynamic data exchange). It saves me work (I check the check box and it remembers it). This is a heck of a lot less work than my learning Reaper (buying reaper) or writing an access program. To be honest I am a bit surprised PG-Music did not already put this checkbox in. When they see this post I am guessing they will be thinking "how could we have forgotten to put that checkbox in?". Easy. No human is immune to making mistakes. We get busy. We can only handle so much. Gee, that reminds me of something I just wrote :-)

I have asked PG 967 times since 1954 to add this feature.
I asked Adar to add it to the BBPlugin code, that is a different code, and he added it.
In the PIC below you don't have to learn Reaper to do that, and as I said I can modify the script to save it to a text file that can Import into Audacity.
Reaper is free to try n try n try n try n try......til your heart's content then you can pay for it if you so like.
As long as BB2016 exports to musicxml.