Perusal Score Viewer (Maybe)

I discovered this service that converts any PDF into a slick browser-based document viewer, and immediately thought it might be a good way to present a score for cursory perusal. After playing around with it, I’m not so sure, but I’d love to know what others think. One of my complaints is that the icons are pretty inscrutable to those who aren’t up on the conventions.

Sibelius and Leopard

I hope this information will be obsolete within a few days, but having done the research, I’d like to help out any other Mac/Sibelius users out there.

If you’re upgrading to Leopard and still using Sibelius 4, you’ll need to get a compatibility patch from Sibelius. Unless, that is, you don’t need to be able to, uh, open and save files.

A Great Tool for Writing

If you’re a Mac user and you do any writing at all, you should take a look at Scrivener. At first, you’ll think it’s a word processor, but you’ll find it’s a lot more interesting and useful. My 30-day trial period just ended, and I paid for it without hesitation.

Basically, Scrivener makes it easy to break your writing down hierarchically. So, if you organize your writing around an outline, even a really simple one in your head, Scrivener makes it easy to put your ideas where they fit within the outline, to be fleshed out in situ or moved around, or whatever.

I discovered Scrivener by way of 43 Folders, a blog I follow to satisfy my inner geek. Merlin Mann does a better and more thorough job of explaining it than I do, so feel free to just jump over to his review.

By the way, Merlin’s non-linear approach to writing sounds a lot like the way I compose. I think it’s a good way to work actually.

If you write like I do (and I pray that you do not), you have a messy approach to drafting that is iterative, intuitive, and far from linear. You do a brain dump, then type a little, then research a little, then type a little more, then move a bunch of stuff around, then groan aloud, then 80% start over and so on until something is done. Yes, it would be more tidy if we all followed the mandate of our elementary school teachers and wrote perfect 5-paragraph essays straight from a completed outline. But, such is life. And Scrivener seems to get that.

What It Does

There are several views of your work. The basic working view is a folder tree on the left, representing your outline, or whatever kind of hierarchy you have, and your writing on the right.

So, let’s say you’re writing a little biography of Bartók. You might create several outline items in the tree on the left, say, Early Life, Conservatory, Folk Music Collecting, Works, Emigration. Under “Works”, you can then put any number of sub-items (piano, orchestral, chamber, choral, etc.), and so on. If you start out inspired to write about Bartók’s emigration, it’s now very easy to just start there. Later, you may decide to be clever and open with his emigration. So, you just drag that item up to where you want it in the tree.

When you’ve filled in all your content, Scrivener will export the whole thing into whatever real word processor you like for final editing and polishing.

There’s another view, which is kind of interesting. It’s a corkboard, with all of your notes presented as index cards pinned to it. You can double click any index card to drill down to any sub-items on a new corkboard.

I’ve only scratched the surface of what Scrivener can do. In the past month, I’ve used it to prepare a pre-concert talk, and I’m now using it to organize the lyrics for the musical I’m now working on. (And I’m using it to write this post.)

Online File Conversion

I’ve just gotten wind of this new (free) service that will convert just about any file from one format to just about any other format. Meet Zamzar.

It’s as simple as can be: you upload your file, choose the desired target format and provide your email address. After the file is uploaded, you get an email with a link to the converted file. It works for a variety of image, document, audio and video formats.

I just tested it, and it worked brilliantly and quickly. In my case, for some of my posts (like the last one, and the one coming up), I need to convert files from iTunes format to mp3, so I can edit them and link to the snippets. Until now this has been extremely cumbersome.

So, try Zamzar. Hope you find it useful.

Flying Blind (or What Has Sibelius Done To My Inner Hearing?)

The sewer project has turned out to be a complete fiasco. It now appears that my studio is going to look like this for at least a couple more weeks.

Meanwhile, I’d been revising Letter To Hungary for its upcoming second performance, and the parts are just about due. I’ve been forced to work at my desk, where I do have Sibelius, but it’s not hooked up to any playback gear.

Yes, over the past four years or so, I’ve become spoiled by Sibelius playback. Fortunately, it’s mostly about tweaking dynamic markings and orchestration, so there’s really no need to play anything back, but today I did grapple with one very important passage that needed some relatively elaborate reworking. It was a struggle, but I got it done.

I’m not sure how I feel about this phenomenon with Sibelius. I was never one of those geniuses who writes everything in his head, but I did use to be able to accomplish a lot without being able to play back what I was writing. You know… back when it was pencil and paper. In cases where I needed to hear how harmonies progressed, I would plonk it out on the piano. But here’s the thing: I’m not a good pianist, and I rarely write for piano. Sibelius playback has saved me countless hours trying to work out composition problems by playing back exactly what’s on the page instead of the best my fingers can accomplish.

If my inner hearing has suffered, other aspects of composing have improved. Writing for strings, for example, was enhanced I think because Sibelius lets me think orchestrally. Also, I work much more quickly now than ever. I’ve learned to get my ideas down without agonizing over whether they’ll work. I play back frequently and do trial and error and triage until the problems are solved.

As for my revisions, I’m mostly satisfied. I had shown the piece to my former teacher (thanks, C.S.!), who had some wonderful suggestions. One in particular I simply can’t pull off under the current circumstances, which I regret.

After this, I’m just holding off on composing until I get my room back. I guess I’ll catch up on paperwork

Sibelius Acquired by Digidesign

Yesterday music notation software maker Sibelius announced that they were acquired by Digidesign��, maker of Pro Tools�, and whose parent company Avid also owns M-Audio�. In the official press release, both companies seem to emphasize the educational possibilities of the merger, which is good.

As for new products that may result, the idea of some future hybrid of Sibelius’ current notation software and Pro Tools is tantalizing. I already use Sibelius for everything. (When I tell this to people in film scoring circles, they look at me like something’s hanging out of my nose.) It would be handy to be able to incorporate synchronized audio, for example, into a piece notated in Sibelius without having to dump it into another audio/MIDI sequencing program.

I love Sibelius to pieces, so I’m looking forward to seeing what new products, if any, emerge from this new relationship with Digidesign.