Info-Mac 4/Info_Mac IV CD-ROM (Pacific HiTech Inc.)(August 1994).iso/Sound/Utilities/Nightingale 1.4 Demo Folder/Nightingale Essentials/Nightingale Help/Nightingale Help.rsrc/TEXT_103_QuickChange and Get Info.txt

Text File | 1994-05-21 | 4KB | 26 lines

Nightingale has two ways to allow you to “hack” the information describing musical symbols: ‘QuickChange’ and ‘Get Info’.  QuickChange is as safe as anything in Nightingale. However, Get Info is a different story: it allows nearly direct access to Nightingale's data tables; as a result, Nightingale cannot always check that your changes are sensible, and incautious changes can have surprising—and possibly damaging—results to your score. So avoid Get Info whenever there’s another way to do what you want.

• The QuickChange command has several options for making low-level changes to whatever is selected.  The selection can contain any number of symbols—it can even be discontinuous.  Among other things, QuickChange is useful for:
    - changing note head shapes to get harmonics, x-heads, etc. or to make them invisible.
        - changing the visibility of the accessory numeral or bracket of a bunch of tuplets
        - resetting the velocities of notes by “applying table” (the table in the MIDI Velocity Prefs command) to update them after changing the dynamics-to-velocity mapping table
    - vertically aligning pieces of text that are different heights, or moving them to a new height
    - moving a group of notes from one voice or staff to another
    - changing stem lengths (units are in quarters of the distance between two staff lines)
    - restoring hopelessly botched (by dragging) slurs to their original shapes

• Get Info is a tool for seeing and changing the fine details of a musical symbol.  Unlike QuickChange, it works on only one symbol at a time—you select a note, for instance, then choose ‘Get Info’ (Edit menu).  A dialog box will tell you about its graphical, musical and MIDI characteristics, and you can change the values by typing different numbers in the boxes.  For instance, Get Info provides ways—some convenient, some clumsy—of:
    - fine-tuning symbol positions, including the distance between an accidental and its note, or the horizontal or vertical position of a note’s augmentation dots
        - fine-tuning loudness, i.e., MIDI velocity
    - changing the lengths of octave signs and hiding their “cutoff” lines
    - changing articulation (by changing ‘Play duration’ )
    - adjust the left and right end positions, and the vertical height, of repeat ending brackets. This is probably the most reliable method for doing this.
    - modifying accidentals both in notation (1 thru 5 are double-flat thru double-sharp, 0 is none) and in sound (add or subtract 1 or 2 to the MIDI note number). But this is usually easier to do by dragging.

Distances are normally in quarters of a point, i.e., “LaserWriter” (300 DPI) pixels. Vertical coordinates are relative to the top of the staff.  As with many sequencers, play durations are in 480ths of a quarter note (e.g., 8th note = 240, triplet 8th = 160, 16th note = 120, etc.).

Notice the distinction, for some musical symbols, between “groups” and “symbols”.  For example, all notes and rests that occur at the same time, regardless of their staff or voice, are grouped into a structure called a “sync”. In this case the sync is the group, each note or rest is a symbol. (To help understand this, try the ‘Show Sync Lines’ command.) Similarly, all key signatures or time signatures inserted with a single command are made into a group.

Again, a warning: Get Info does very little error checking. Furthermore, it updates the screen to only a limited extent, and the units of distance are too small to be convenient for most purposes. For these reasons, other tools, especially QuickChange and dragging, should be used whenever possible.