PDF sheet music/MIDI question

[DaleDe]

Here is a trial version that may do what you need.
http://www.notation.com/Download.php

A quick search turned this up.

http://www.skytopia.com/project/articles/notation.html

Dale

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by Psymon

I was thinking that it would be pretty cool if there was some "magical" way of doing it so that every single bar of music (and not just each measure) was a separate image, and you could put them side-by-side each other, and whenever it got to the end of the "line" the next bar would just wrap over to the next "line" and become a new measure, and in that way have it somehow scalable somehow by adjusting the font size, and have each measure change/wrap accordingly.

Perhaps there will be a javascript library in EPUB along the lines of how MathJAX could be used for math. I am not too sure on sheet music in HTML (never ever looked into typesetting sheet music until today). It seems like there is this standard called MusicXML:

http://www.musicxml.com/
http://www.musicxml-viewer.com/

I am definitely not familiar with including any of that javascript stuff in books, and it wouldn't work on most of the devices out there anyway, so I personally wouldn't waste my time (I would focus on the SVG/PNG side of things so it would be able to work on a maximum amount of devices).

Originally Posted by DaleDe

too bad, but maybe you can fake it by sending a midi file to standard out and then reading it in somehow.

Hmm, seems like you might be able to go from MIDI -> PMX -> MusiXTeX:

http://homepage1.nifty.com/kuuku/pub...x/index-e.html

Documentation on PMX:

http://icking-music-archive.org/software/pmx/pmx270.pdf

[pholy]

I'm using MuseScore 1.3, which _will_ do a midi file import. It doesn't use an import command, I just do an Open, and then browse to my midi file. No problem.

[Doitsu]

Have a look at EasyABC (Windows/OSX freeware). You can import .midi files with it and save them as .svg files.
As for embedding sound, check out SMIL. However, so far only ePub3 apps support it.

[Psymon]

Originally Posted by pholy

I'm using MuseScore 1.3, which _will_ do a midi file import. It doesn't use an import command, I just do an Open, and then browse to my midi file. No problem.

Oh! Ha ha, you're right! I had no problem opening up the MIDI at all in that way, simply using the "open" command!

The only odd thing, though, is that it seems to have doubled-up all the music for some reason -- I've got 6 staves where there should be only 3 (two for piano, treble and bass, and one for voice), but all three are shown twice.

I guess I could probably fix that up and delete those duplicated staves, but I'm a bit iffy about just using this, as there's a copyright notice (or, at least, credit for the creator of the MIDI file) embedded within it, and so I could run into issues in just using it for my own purposes -- plus it's in a different key signature, too, from the original sheet music that I had before. The nice thing about the latter was that I'd scanned it from a turn-of-the-century music book, so that's in the public domain.

I guess that leaves me with a couple (or three) options: I could write to the creator of that MIDI (if they're still around on the web) and ask for permission to use it; or bite the bullet and transcribe the sheet music that I have into MuseScore; or try to figure out how to convert that already-scanned sheet music into SVG via Adobe Illustrator.

I guess this looks like my project for today -- at least, play around the latter two ideas, and see if I get anywhere. Thanks for the eye-opener about opening up MIDI files in MuseScore, though, Pholy!

[Psymon]

Okay! I actually managed to get the entire 2 pages of sheet music converted to SVG format (with each measure as a separate file, so I now have 9 separate SVG files), but I really feel stupid because I'm clueless as to what to do with them now. I took at the wiki here on using SVG images...

https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/SVG

...but all it does is confuse me even more!

I also tried to upload one of my SVG images here, if only to see if you could tell me that I did them right, but when I try to upload it I get a message saying "Invalid File".

I don't know what the heck I'm doing, but I guess if I knew what code I'm supposed to use in order to insert these SVG images into my book, then I could at least test it out and see if it works or not -- I just don't understand what I'm supposed to do with them now, though.

[Psymon]

Okay, just to follow up on my last reply, I've been poking around here and there trying to find the answer to what I'm supposed to do, and did find one place that said to simply just insert the SVG images like one would insert any other image, basically. So I've tried that, and it does seem to work just fine in ADE -- if I re-size the window, the images stretch nicely and look good and everything -- but in iBooks on the iPad, although things seem okay at first when viewing it in two-page landscape mode, as soon as I rotate it to single-page portrait, the images don't stretch to the width of the page.

Like I said, I don't know what the heck I'm doing with these SVG images! In fact, what's the reasoning behind using them in the first place? Why not just simply use JPEG or PNG images instead? I'd have no problem plopping those in and getting them to fit/re-size to the width of the page.

Anyway, here's an ebook I threw together with the sheet music in it, in SVG format, if you want to take a peek at how I did it (without knowing what I'm doing).

[DaleDe]

Nice effort on the ePub. Looks really good to me. You are paving some new ground here that will expand everyone's horizons on the power of SVG.

Dale

[Psymon]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

Nice effort on the ePub. Looks really good to me. You are paving some new ground here that will expand everyone's horizons on the power of SVG.

Oh, wow, I don't know what the heck I did! Ha ha ha, seriously, I went into this totally blindly, having no idea what I was doing -- someone said that I should use SVG instead of JPEG or PNG, but I still don't know why. I just did as I was told!

And as I said, in iBooks, at least, it's not working correctly -- I have my width set at 100%, but when I go in portrait mode it's clearly not 100%. If I'd done them up as a JPEG or PNG, though, I'm sure that wouldn't have been a problem at all. I have no idea what I did wrong here -- any ideas? It does seem to display okay in ADE, but just not iBooks.

[Psymon]

I figured out the problem re the images showing up smaller in portrait mode in iBooks! My original scans of the two pages of sheet music were at 300dpi, and then I cropped those two pages down to individual measures, which gave me 9 separate PSD images (still at 300dpi). Then I brought those into Illustrator, did an "auto trace" on them (using the grayscale option) and then saved them as SVG -- but I guess that resolution info gets embedded in the SVG file.

Just as an experiment, I re-did the first image, changing the resolution to 72dpi, switched that one for the 300dpi one in my book, and now it stretches to the full width of the page.

Interesting that iBooks pays attention to image resolution, and displays it accordingly! I guess I'd just assumed that, as with web pages, even if you insert a higher-res image it would still just display it "by pixels", essentially ignoring any different resolution.

Anyway, that answers that -- although I'm still wondering why it's better to use SVG instead of JPEG or PNG. With SVG, isn't there more of a risk that the image format won't be supported by some device or other out there? I really don't know much (if anything) about SVG, never worked with them until now.

[Psymon]

Okay, here's another follow-up -- I've attached a couple of screenshots here to, um, "illustrate." They're basically the same image, one with a white background and one with a black ("night") background, but there's a couple of different issues that they show.

Looking at either one, you can see the problem I mentioned before re my having first put in images that had a resolution of 300dpi. The first measure (and third/fourth) of the music shown is after I'd re-done that measure/image at 72dpi, while the second (and fifth) measure is still at 300dpi -- both had exactly the same dimensions, essentially, as far as pixels go, but it was just the resolution that was different, and as you can see iBooks displays the higher-res one at a smaller size.

For the third and fourth measures here, though (which are both the same image, but different formats), I thought I'd see what it would look like to use a bit of colour -- i.e. the colours that I use for the headings, ornaments, etc. throughout the book. Of those two duplicate measures, the first one is in SVG format, whereas the second is a transparent PNG. To me, they're virtually the same as far as quality goes, but with the PNG one, when you change your settings to black ("night") mode, at least the PNG is indeed transparent.

Isn't that nicer? So why on earth would I use SVG, if PNG is basically just nicer (and probably more widely supported)?

Inquiring minds wanna know!

[DaleDe]

SVG is vector imaging and PNG is raster/bitmap imaging check our wiki for details at Graphics. the text is real text in SVG and is searchable and scalable. SVG is fully supported in ePub 2 and ePub 3 but not the old mobi format although it is supported in KF8. As to scaling PNG, JPG, GIF etc scale by taking the image pixels and duplicating some number of them at the new resolution. It can cause jaggies in the image. SVG on the other hand draws the image at the new resolution. It scales the points where the lines end but the line itself is drawn at full resolution like a person would do if they were to redraw an image larger.

Think of SVG as drawing on a sheet of graph paper. The graph paper is rescaled at the new resolution and then the image is drawn on top of the graph paper.

Dale

[Jellby]

It should be possible to make the SVG transparent too, and with some luck to take the surrounding text colour.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by Jellby

It should be possible to make the SVG transparent too, and with some luck to take the surrounding text colour.

Looking at the svg file itself I see the canvas/view port specified enable background. I have never seen that before and suspect it may be causing the issue, perhaps to avoid a black on black condition with the lines and text.

<svg version="1.1" id="tombowling-1a_xA0_Image_1_" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"
	 x="0px" y="0px" width="372.96px" height="86.88px" viewBox="0 0 372.96 86.88" enable-background="new 0 0 372.96 86.88"
	 xml:space="preserve">

Dale

[DomesticExtremis]

Your book looks lovely - bravo!

I can't comment on the iPad, but it works
just fine on my Kobo Mini, both as epub and kepub.