Songbook editing

[hrj]

Finished the Consonance songbook at entirely too late last night (although the lateness was due to my procrastination, not due to any enormous amount of work involved). It seems like every time I pull out my music notation program, I have to re-learn all the tricks from scratch. And just when I get proficient again, the project's done. This time, much work was eliminated by receiving some of the original tunes as midi files, which can be fed into the notation program as a starting point. Just finished the proofreading over my lunch hour and have a number of minor corrections, plus a long list of "can I tweak this spacing just a little?" notes. Fortunately, among the tricks I re-learned are all the space-tweaking ones. My own deficiencies aside, I'm quite fond of my current notation program (Smart Score by Musitek). I contains pretty much all the features that I swore over not having back when BL and I were doing songbooks at Wail Songs. (My favorite being "link lyrics syllable-by-syllable to the notes so that when you move or copy the notes around, the lyrics follow".) The feature that really sold me, but that I haven't used much at all is "OCR for music". One of these days, I'll scan in the printouts from all those old in-progress music book projects just to have them in a more accessible format. (Somewhere I have archive disks of the files -- and even still the program they were created in. But I have very little faith in being able to run a 15 year old DOS program even under the most creative emulation programs available. And simply scanning in the printouts will probably be less work than pulling up the old files and converting them into midis for export.) I rather doubt that either of the other-people's-songbooks that we were working on B.G.S. (before grad school) will ever get resurrected, but there are a few projects of my own that are one of the main reasons I invested in the current software.