PreSonus Forums

After producing a rather lengthy orchestral arrangement which contains several sections of reduced instrumentation I find that I am unable to produce an acceptable print format for these sections because I am unable to control the number of measures in a system. Neither setting the number of measures per system to a fixed number, nor setting the number to automatic produces well formatted results. In both cases single measures or pairs of measures are taking an entire tabloid page.
I have tried correct with choices of system and page breaks without success. I have also tried "link to next measure" and adjusting measure and staff spacing in an effort to shake things up to no avail.
I finally excised one such section from the arrangement and produced a separate score devoid of unnecessary instruments. The results are the same. The much reduced score cannot be formatted for printing in a way that results in a reasonably consistent and uniform measure length.
I must say that I find the process of formatting for print which depends upon a trial and error process with the automatic layout features very cumbersome. The user should have absolute and direct control over all system and page breaks in such a way that the result is not subject to an automatic reformatting process.

I did several experiments with the score you posted, and after a few hours I think I made progress, at least to the level of producing an acceptable PDF, which you can print . . .

This is the score after I did a bit of copying and pasting, which I will explain in the "Thoughts" section (see below) . . .

SW-N6-Formatting-Experiment-7.notion

This is the resulting PDF "sheet music" . . .

SW-N6-Formatting-Experiment-7.pdf

THOUGHTS

After studying the score for a while, I noticed what to me appear to be strange symbols between measures, so when nothing appeared to be working in a copy of the score you posted, I switched to a different strategy, where I created a new score with the same number and types of instruments, which initially was an empty score . . .

[NOTE: What is this symbol? From where did it originate? NOTION? Some other source? ]



Then I copied measures from the original score to the new score, perhaps four measures at a time, and this worked nicely except in a few places . . .

When it didn't work nicely and started to look like the original score, I switched from (a) copying all the instruments for the particular measure to (b) copying the notes for one instrument at a time for the measure, and this produced good results . . .

I reduced the "Notation size" to 4, which is a bit smaller than the original, but so what . . .

As I recall, I changed the border dimensions (sides, top, bottom) to "0,5" to make more space available, and I didn't specify a title and composer data, also to make more space available . . .

Why are there problems?

Based on the strange symbol, one possibility is that the score was created in another program, or at least part of it . . .

Another possibility is that what I call the "strange symbol" is something NOTION supports but I have never encountered it . . .

Since I was able to correct most, if not all, of the problems, this suggests another possibility . . .

The background on the third possibility is that I started working on computers before there were personal computers, and after a while Microsoft released the first version of something called "Windows", which I thought was interesting . . .

I got a personal computer and a copy of the Windows SDK, as well as Microsoft C, and started making sense of it, which took a while . . .

I stayed in bed for about three weeks reading Charles Petzold's classic book on programming Windows--reading a few pages, falling asleep, and so forth . . .

Armed with whatever knowledge I had gleaned--which basically was how to write a program called "Hello World!" in Windows--I got my first job as a Windows application developer, although I learned a while later that the primary reason I got the job was that I drove about 200 miles through a blizzard and got to the interview early . . .

In fact, I knew so little about Windows programming that the two interviewers found it difficult not to laugh at most of my answers to their technical questions . . .

Curiously, by this time I had realized that Windows--as is the case with Mac OS X--is a transaction processing system, and while I didn't know much about Windows programming, I knew a lot about transaction processing . . .

So, even though programming "Hello World!" was a bit of a challenge, I soon was elevated to the level of architecting and designing, since the project was a transaction processing system and for some unknown reason I was the only person in the building who knew about transaction processing systems . . .

The key bit of information is that the programming language was "C", and it's basically a linear programming language . . .

I like low-level "C" programming, because nothing happens until you explicitly tell it to happen with a line of simple code . . .

Around the same time, a new program based on "C" was being developed and promoted, and it was "C++", which among other things has classes and such object-oriented things as "inheritance" . . .

None of that made any sense to me, and now when I do "C++" programming, I focus on using it as if it were "C", which works nicely for me . . .

It's probably a "control" type of thing, where I like to be in control and really don't like stuff to happen automagically, especially when it's not good . . .

Skip forward about 30 years, and both Apple and Microsoft have application development languages that fully embrace "C++" to what I consider to be an absurd level . . .

The problem is that object-oriented programming systems (OOPS) make wonderful sense to the handful of people who designed them, but if you don't conceptualize everything exactly the same way, then it makes no intuitive sense . . .

It's possible that parts of NOTION are written in straightforward, low-level "C", but overall probably not . . .

When I encounter something in NOTION that makes no sense and appears to be confused, I strongly suspect classes, objects, inheritance, subclassing, and all that stuff . . .

Explained another way, I think you have encountered a bit of confusion caused by something . . .

I have several of what I call "work-around" strategies, and one of them is to start with an empty score and see what happens when I copy and paste snippets from a badly behaving score . . .

As explained (see above), copying a handful of measures from the original score into a new score worked nicely most of the time, but there were a few measures that caused problems, so for those measures I copied and pasted the music notation for one instrument at a time, in which case the problems did not occur . . .

In other words, for the troublesome measures, instead of copying and pasting the notes for all the instruments, I copied the notes for the Solo Clarinet and then copied the notes for the Drum Set, and so forth--notes for one instrument at a time, which did not cause page layout changes, next page jumps, and so forth . . .

Is it caused by double-bars? Alphabet section block labels? Something else?

I have no idea, but I suspect that this particular score filters and travels through a maze of various object-oriented classes and all that stuff in an unusual way, which I think can be traced and debugged but probably will be determined to be a very subtle programming error somewhere . . .

If you got some or all of the music notation from another application, then you might want to avoid doing it that way . . .

If you exported the score from another application as MusicXML, then it might be a problem with the way the other program produces MusicXML . . .

At present, I am comfortable stating that NOTION exports MusicXML correctly and imports it correctly, although there probably are a few aspects of MusicXML that NOTION interprets differently because all MusicXML is not the same, and some of it is a bit goofy . . .

There must be something that tells NOTION to start a new page, even though it makes no sense . . .

You get to see some of the stuff, but you don't get to see all the stuff; and I suspect that behind the scene, there is some odd stuff that forces NOTION to do visually stupid things . . .

I also know that there are a lot of things NOTION does that are not documented, and for me this is one of the things that makes NOTION so much FUN . . .

Explained another way, NOTION does a lot more than is documented in the User Guide . . .

From my perspective, all well-designed applications are like this; and when a behavior makes no apparent sense this is a clue that there probably is a "work-around" solution . . .

One of hypotheses in this respect is that software engineers always are working on new functionality and features, but sometimes they are distracted and need to switch to working on other stuff . . .

At such times, I think what happens is that snippets of the new functionality and features simply are left in the code, based on the idea of focusing on them again sometime in the future . . .

In such cases, if you can discover how to activate that code, then you can do more stuff than NOTION claims it will do . . .

It's like the "minefield" flavor of an "Easter egg" . . .

Explained another way, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) detected the Higgs Boson on July 4, 2012, which was verified; and soon thereafter the LHC was taken offline to increase its power . . .

The expectation was that with increased power, the LHC would quickly detect a lot more stuff--including a virtual festival of Supersymmetry (SUSY) particles, thereby providing indisputable proof that all the so-called "modern physicists" do not have their heads inserted fully into their respective arses . . .

However, since the LHC has been back online with significantly increased power so that opposing streams of protons traveling at 0.9999999 the speed of light collide, a grand total of nothing new has been detected--not just a tiny bit, but nothing . . .

One of the consequences is that at minimum I know as little about it as everyone else, which here in the sound isolation studio suggests that some of my ideas might be good . . .

So, I am working on a YouTube video where I explain what I call the "Big Lie", which specifically is that time is discrete and calculus is not goofy . . .

For realists, such as myself, (a) time is continuous; (b) time is fundamental; (c) physical laws emerge from time; and (d) the idea of representing continuous time via a series of infinitesimally small, discrete "slices" of time is vastly goofy . . .

In other words, what about all the stuff that occurs between infinitesimally small "slices"?

What if all the SUSY stuff occurs between "slices" and the reason the LHC isn't detecting any of it is that there are no appropriate detectors or algorithms for analyzing what the LHC detects?

One way to put this into perspective is to consider that sometime in the future, advancing in rank in the military requires being shot with either (a) a standard NATO round or (b) a proton traveling at 0.9999999 the speed of light . . .

I think it would be easy to determine which folks are physicists, because all of them would be standing in the NATO round queue, where there is at least some possibility of surviving . . .

Lots of FUN1

Surf.Whammy wrote
[NOTE: What is this symbol? From where did it originate? NOTION? Some other source? ]

Surf, these are called "System Breaks" in Notion. They have other names that are used in other programs. A google search tells me they're sometimes called "System Separators" in music notations. In a large score, they're meant to indicate to a conductor that the system breaks at that point, since there may be varying numbers of staves on any sheet of a large score and it might be confusing which staves represent a full system of instruments.

This is from the Notion Help manual as to how to place them in a score:

richardchick wroteThe user should have absolute and direct control over all system and page breaks in such a way that the result is not subject to an automatic reformatting process.

Notion is different in approach from competitor programs, and if one's used to those, then it can indeed seem cumbersome. Since I learned to build notation in Notion without ever using those others, I find there's plenty of control once one becomes accustomed to the use of all the settings in the Full Score Options menu.

My work involves reproducing scores so I work with these settings all the time. I never change the Measures per System setting, but always leave it set to "Automatic." I find that the Layout > Notation Size setting is really the key to getting the appropriate number of measures per page/system. Once I get that dialed in (I usually get it set so that it's creating the desired number of measures or one extra on each system) then I use the Measure > Force New System or Force New Page commands to regulate the layout of the score as I proceed with filling in notes in the measures.

I'll then use the Layout functionality to fine-tune measure sizes and system spacing/page layout as needed for a graphically pleasing score layout. However, once I get the required system breaks and notation size correct I typically find that very little manual adjustment with the layout tool is needed.

michaelmyers1 wrote

Surf.Whammy wrote
[NOTE: What is this symbol? From where did it originate? NOTION? Some other source? ]

Surf, these are called "System Breaks" in Notion.

Being a "system break" indicator was one of the possibilities that appeared, but here in the sound isolation studio it would require me to know what a "system" is; hence it made no intuitive sense and it was the first thing I didn't copy and paste . . .

THOUGHTS

It's possible that decades ago I knew what a "system" and a "system break" were, since for several years I was in a liturgical boys choir and learned how to sight-read soprano music notation for songs composed by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and so forth, which over the years has been a useful skill . . .

But sometime around the age of 12 years, one's perspective changes, and what might be called "hormonal motivation" leads one to focus on music in a different way based primarily on observing that girls go crazy over Elvis . . .

In other words, the primary realizations are (a) that it's good to have a lot of girls in your fan club and (b) being in a Rock and Roll musical group is the most likely way to have a fan club . . .

Soon thereafter, like-minded mutants get together and form what colloquially are called "garage bands" and learn how to play popular songs by listening to records and identifying notes and phrases one note at a time "by ear" . . .

As your skill in doing this increases, it's not so long before you know two songs, both of which in retrospect are remarkably simple but nevertheless cool . . .





At first, I had a string bass; but later I switched to electric bass; and in part due to being the only mutant in town who had a string bass, I joined forces with a fellow mutant who was a proficient pianist and saxophonist and actually could read sheet music . . .

This led to playing string bass in a musical group in local nightclubs when I was in the 9th grade . . .

The piano player was 14 years-old; looked a lot older; owned and drove a car; owned a house; and was married, which made it all the more surreal . . .

He knew I didn't read bass clef sheet music but knew the notes on a piano; so when someone asked us to play a song I didn't know, he provided visual clues by playing bass notes with his left hand on the piano, which was all I needed to understand the chord pattern and was all I needed to know . . .

The local nightclubs served alcohol, but since the piano player and I were in the band, nobody gave a hoot . . .

A while later, I switched to electric bass and started playing "teenage" music rather than songs from the "Hit Parade" of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s . . .

For me, none of this required sheet music, since (a) I didn't know how to read bass clef and (b) for the most part there was no sheet music for currently popular songs until months after the songs became popular . . .

I learned songs from records by playing the records at double speed, thereby making the electric bass notes sound like soprano notes, which I knew and could identify easily . . .

All this time the key bit of information is that for me none of this involved sheet music, since I did everything "by ear" . . .

Fast forward a bit, and I used the same technique to learn the notes of lead guitar solos--except that instead of playing records at double speed, I played them at half speed, thereby making the lead guitar notes and phrases sound like electric bass, which by that time I knew and could identify notes and phrases "by ear" easily . . .

Jump forward to the present, and now I do nearly everything with music notation and virtual instruments in what I consider to be the most simple way possible with respect to the subset of music notation I consider to be practical . . .

I do everything in "Continuous" view when I am working in NOTION, and I avoid as much "fancy" music notation as possible, which includes repeats and everything else that primarily is focused on producing sheet music rather than generating audio . . .

And I don't use dynamics, articulations, and all that stuff . . .

Instead, I use sampled sound libraries that have notes played in specific articulations, styles, and so forth; and I control dynamics, motion, and spatial stuff when I switch to producing and audio engineering with such things as effects plug-ins for compressors, limiters, equalizers, reverberation units, and echo units, as well as panning and what I call "sparkling", which is spreading notes across multiple instances of the same instrument, where each instance is panned to a different location . . .

Occasionally, I do a few instrumental parts with real instruments--mostly lead guitar phrases and solos that are not easily done with a virtual electric guitar and music notation--so it's not all virtual . . .

I do the music notation on ReWire MIDI staves in NOTION, and the notes are played by virtual instruments hosted in Studio One Professional, which is the optimal way to do this in both digital music production applications . . .

This is good song that was done with Digital Performer (MOTU) as the ReWire host controller, which was before I discovered what I call the "ReWire MIDI" strategy using Studio One Professional as the ReWire host controller . . .

NOTION sends the generated MIDI to Digital Performer via External MIDI staves, as well as generated audio for the instruments NOTION hosts, but after doing a series of experiments I now do this with Studio One Professional and NOTION, which is much easier and produces better results . . .

[NOTE: This is best enjoyed when listening with studio quality headphones like SONY MDR-7506 headphones (a personal favorite), since there are a lot of motion and spatial effects, including "sparkled" instruments . . . ]



Project: "Sweet Hour of Prayer" (PreSonus NOTION Forum)

This is the current song I am developing, and it uses the "ReWire MIDI" strategy . . .

[NOTE: As in "Sweet Hour of Prayer", the virtual female soprano is Realivox Blue (Realitone) . . . ]



Project: SoMC ~ Paint a Song with Numbers (PreSonus NOTION Forum)

At present, the interlude is highly repetitive, but I have identified a chord progression that will work nicely . . .

The "big problem" is devising vocal melodies and lyrics, but I am making a bit of progress . . .

From my perspective, I have no immediately conscious idea why I compose instrumental stuff that is very difficult to "melodize" and write lyrics; but it's good in the sense of pushing the limits with respect to expanding my ability to devise melodies and lyrics in what for me are very complex chord patterns and instrumentation . . .

The same thing happened with this song, which also is done using the "ReWire MIDI" strategy . . .



Project: ReWire ~ NOTION + Studio One Professional (PreSonus NOTION Forum)

As best as I can determine, nobody intuitively gets the allegory, but it's there; and if I am consistent in the allegory department, I might use "dark psychic forces" as the theme for "SoMC" . . .

As you know--which I can attest with no reservations whatsoever--the more you do with NOTION, the more sense it makes and the better you become at doing it . . .

It took me a few hours of experimenting to make sense of the sheet music formatting problem, and while I didn't completely solve the problem, I devised a practical work-around, which is good in terms of being practical . . .

And now I know what a "system break" is, which I suppose will make even more sense when I discover what a "system" is . . .

On a related note, when you get good at "by ear" stuff, sooner or later you develop the ability to memorize four hours of songs, at which time you can make money playing songs in local nightclubs--even when you are a "hormonally motivated" mutant in the 9th grade . . .

Lots of FUN!

After a few days away from the problem I decided to make one more attempt to clean up the formatting on this file. I have also been working in "dark mode" on my Mac Pro and decided to switch back to the normal black on white screen behavior. I did not think it likely that there was a bug in the screen drivers that would impact the score format but I was concerned that I could not see any "hidden" items when View>Show hidden items was selected.
I started by reducing the number of bars/system to 2 and reformatting using automatic formatting. The resultant format was not correct in that it contained spurious one-system pages but inspection of the individual measures involved showed system breaks and page breaks that accounted for the conditions. When these breaks were removed the score was reformatted to a consistent 2-bars per system with no spurious page breaks.
I then reformatted the score using Measures per system: "Automatic" and the score was correctly formatted with no spurious system or page breaks.
I am now suspicious that there is a compatibility issue with Mac OS Mojave when operating in Dark mode.