Letter to NtEd-users

This is a letter to Jörg Anders, and the nted-users mailing list.

This morning, I felt like creating a draft of a musical score, and boil it in various ways. Direct Lilypond, which I sometimes do, would have been a bit heavy for this exploratory work, so I looked around for helping tools, and found NtEd, which looked both usable and useful. There is a great deal of work captured into that package, and I'm quite grateful, Jörg, that you created it, and made it available to all of us. Thanks a lot for this.

Ubuntu Karmic offers version 1.5.1, which I used most of the day. Yet this afternoon, already hooked, I fetched sources for 1.9.18, recompiled and installed them. This was surprisingly easy and smooth, and given the complexity of the thing, I admire a job well done! Moreover, a few little bugs or irritations from 1.5.1 merely vanished, so it was worth reinstalling. This version also implements some fairly interesting new features. In particular, I enjoyed the MIDI input features, and the quality of the writing style in the generated Lilypond source.

Finally, I peeked at all archives from the nted-users mailing list, which happily enough, were not too voluminous. Notable is your apparent hate of the idea of a Windows port — not that I need any, of course, but even if I do not much praise Microsoft, I feel much more neutral, by comparison! ☺ Another astonishing remark is this sentence you wrote on 2010-02-02: Actually I want the perfect music notation and playing tool. Which is quite a challenge and undertaking!

So, I dare a few comments, hoping you'll forgive me. I do not have much experience with NtEd yet, so many things surely escape me.

My main struggle today was about cutting and pasting between voices and staves, or restricting some operations to be per-voice (or maybe a few chosen voices). Currently, there does not seem to be a way to extract a single voice to a (maybe temporary) stave, or two combine all voices from two staves into a single stave (presuming that there is no more than four voices in both). Or to paste into a voice without erasing the other voices in the same staves. Or to switch a selection from one voice to another. It might even be useful to insert within a voice (the voice equivalent of insert block) without changing the others.

Even if this was not my case today, let's presume one is working at a fugue, or any kind of ricarcere. The various themes and counter-subjects have to be repeated and mixed from a voice to another, and before the harmony gets perfect, the musician would like to try in various ways. An score editor like NtEd should ideally ease such works. Moreover, the themes have to be transposed (one voice at a time), and even, in some more complex but not so unusual cases, reversed (symmetry around an horizontal axe), elongated (doubling the time of each note) or squeezed (halving the time of each note). I quote this merely to illustrate possible usages.

(For the record, someone else presented a similar request on the mailing list, a while ago.)

What is the purpose of asking the paper size, once some MIDI has been collected? Could not it be deduced from the preferences, the same as it is done already for the main NtEd edit page?

When two voices collide (are in unison) on one beat and then diverge on the following beat, while the lower note (say) stay the same, I did not find a way to create a tie between the two lower notes. It works, however, if the initial beat has no unison: a tie is then obeyed. I append a .ntd file to this message for illustrating my attempt. Of course, one may simulate a tie with a slur (I did not try). While it would be acceptable visually, the MIDI rendering would differ.

Thanks for listening and, of course, for giving me such a nice tool!