[SWLUG] From sheet music to noises.

[Edward Evans]

On Fri, 14 Oct 2005 16:06:41 +0100
Telsa Gwynne <hobbit at aloss.ukuu.org.uk> wrote:

> I have some sheet music for four (and more) voices and I want to get
> the hang of particular lines. I don't have a piano in the house and
> it's not going to fit into the range of a descant recorder. So I can't
> record those and then just play them back at myself until I know them.
> 
> I suspect I can, though, laboriously type the music into SomeMusicApp
> and tell it then to generate the sound that that music makes. And then
> feed that to SomeSoundApp and turn it into wavs or oggs. (Oggs, being
> smaller, would be better for me.) 
> 

If you had SomeMusicApp and SomeSoundApp installed and working, this
would be quite a practical thing to do, so if you are going to stay in
the choir, and will have to learn lots of new music it might be worth
taking the time to get it set up now.

I only know how to get the sound as midi, and I would use Denemo to type
in the notes.  Rosegarden is a much better midi sequencer, and Notedit
is generally a more developed prog, but they both have awful interfaces,
while Denemo is very easy - arrow to the required line on the stave,
press a number key for the note length and there it is.  What's more
important, the whole thing works sensibly when you make a mistake and
have to go back and correct it.  The trouble with Denemo is that it's
developing fast, lots of changes from one version to the next and not
very stable.  The versions with Ubuntu 5 and Deb 3.1, for instance,
don't have all the key bindings defined, you have to go into Edit,
Keyboard and do them yourself.  I found that Timidity was the easiest
midi player to set up, although I had to include Freepats because my
sound card doesn't do sound synthesis, and you have to tell Denemo to
use Timidity in the Preferences menu. You may also need to install
Lilypond (which prints out the beautiful music), but not use it; I think
Denemo uses it to create the midi file.  You have to make sure alsa or
whatever is set up to play midi, then type in your music, click play on
the Denemo menu and listen.  In earlier versions you could start and
stop the playback in the middle, but that doesn't seem to work in ver
0.7.

I have no idea how to convert midi to wav or something else if you need
that - anyone got any suggestions.

Enjoy the choir!

Edward Evans