help with transposition

[JJvanElburg]

Hi,
Could anyone help me out with transposing the Sibelius file of Victoria Salve Regina à 8 a tone down? I've tried it but it seems to upset the lay out, and I don't feel like redoing the whole score myself.
Thanks!
JJVE

[DaveF]

That sounds pretty much like what you can expect from Sibelius. I don't know whether versions 5 and 6 are any better, but 4 is quite good at wrecking whatever layout you've carefully set up if you apply transpositions or other changes. Have you tried selecting the whole score and locking the format before doing the transposition? That sometimes holds things together a bit better.

DF

[JJvanElburg]

Hello,
I presume you are David Fraser, the man himself?
I have Sibelius 5 and even if I lock the whole file, with the transposition the layout is completely ruined!
Can you help me, or is that not possible?
thanks anyway for your answer!
JanJoost

[Cdalitz]

Have you tried instead the lilypond sources from http://www.uma.es/victoria/partituras.html?
I would recommend to use the appropriate LilyPond version (the very old 1.5, I think), because using convert-ly does not work very well in my experiences.

LilyPond does transposition with the \transpose command.

[carlos]

Hi Jan, I followed the same process as you probably did (open file > lock layout > transpose) using Sibelius 5 and indeed the original layout is lost: some measures change their size and the distances between notes become a mess. I tried to fix these issues but with no success. I have to say I've always hated Sibelius in this respect , it's so little intuitive and I can't find how to do even simple things as locking a single page in the program window...

[JJvanElburg]

That's why I'll always stick to Finale!
By the way, the problem has been solved: someone transposed it for me and I adjusted all the notes.... o tedeum!
Thanks,
JJ

[luis henriques]

Finale rules!

[fdoell]

I am totally surprised to hear about problems on such a low level of difficulty with a program that was often named with programs like Finale in the same breath. Good to know, that this program that is called "highly professional" in their ads has bugs of this kind. So I will stay with recommendations of Finale.

Friedhelm

[pml]

As a long-time Sibelius user this thread eventually piqued my interest, since I’ve found from nearly a decade of experience that you have to go to a considerable amount of effort to stuff up Sibelius’ formatting, since the default settings are usually fairly robust.

The formatting of the original Sibelius 2 file (pace, DF) appeared extremely bizarre to begin, with all of Sibelius 5 import options turned on, so before I even tried transposing it I imported my own customised house style. Transposition worked mostly okay at that point - once a usable house style was loaded in. This revealed a whole lot of strange editing decisions, deliberately intended to override the way Sibelius' page layout and margins work. For example, rather than changing the amount of space between the left page margin and the initial system barline (which you do on a score-wide level in Layout), every single system in the score had been dragged a different, arbitrary amount leftwards "by sight". In other places, two blank bars have been inserted to change vertical spacing, which again is a gross hack (albeit one I've used on occasion).

What's more, most of the score was "locked down" to start with in order to force rather a lot of bars together, which modern spacing rules (where the crotchet, rather than the minim or semibreve, is the commonest duration affecting metre) would have split those bars over multiple systems. Once you alter the note spacing rule (which has been there since version 1...) in accordance with the longer note values in Renaissance music, do a "select all" and respace the score, almost all of these problems disappear.

Question: was this Sibelius file actually an import from another program in the first place?

Regards, PML

[JJvanElburg]

L.S.
It was a Sibelius file in the first place, that was the big surprise. It had been edited and adjusted before the transposition, but when I transposed it, the whole lay out was lost, and it took a very long time to repair it. I'm definitely a Finale man but I would think that a sophisticated programme as Sibelius would have solved this without having to jump through 13 hoops...
Ah well, it is sorted now but it has confirmed my belief that for me Finale works better!
Thanks for all the comments,
JanJoost van Elburg

[pml]

Perhaps for you, but it was only about five to ten minutes work maximum for me to unwrestle the score to the desired point - which was maybe what I should have done in the first place when I noticed this thread (but I'm not paid to fix other people's problems at present).

Sibelius and Finale are both examples of complicated software, and knowing how the program works in all of its features - rather than the 10% that the average user comes across - is desirable when trying to deal with a badly formatted file, rather than throwing up one's hands and saying "It's too hard to fix, so it must be the program's bad design". And it's hardly 13 hoops - the basic method I described above used about three or four commands (besides Transpose).

Regards, PML

[carlos]

(but I'm not paid to fix other people's problems at present).

Strange to read it coming from you, Philip. I always thought that one of the main concepts behind CPDL (and IMSLP, where you are an active admin) was exactly to foster cooperation via voluntary work.

Sibelius and Finale are both examples of complicated software, and knowing how the program works in all of its features - rather than the 10% that the average user comes across - is desirable when trying to deal with a badly formatted file, rather than throwing up one's hands and saying "It's too hard to fix, so it must be the program's bad design".

As for what concerns me in particular, I never said that Sibelius wasn't professional, I just said that it was not intuitive, a valid complaint (and yes, it has to do with bad design). Of course, once we master a new software, all its commands become easy to use, but until we reach that level, all that the "average user" expects to find is intuitive comands and functions, meaningful and explanatory error messages, and so on.

[pml]

Hi Carlos,

[quote=carlos]Strange to read it coming from you, Philip. I always thought that one of the main concepts behind CPDL (and IMSLP, where you are an active admin) was exactly to foster cooperation via voluntary work.[/quote]

It might be related to either becoming a misanthropic grouch in my old age :) or just having very limited or circumscribed amounts of time to work on collaborative Internet projects. A look at either site will confirm I've had very little time to actually do much in the way of admin tasks, unfortunately.

As for software - both Sibelius and Finale in their "pro" versions aspire to the highest quality of musical typesetting, and neither company would expect 100% of their feature set to be "intuitive", or for users to try to operate the software without ever coming into contact with the manual, believe it or not. By comparison, how many people typeset Lilypond files without reading the documentation?

Regards, Philip

[vaarky]

Do Finale, Sibelius and LilyPond all have a graphical interface, or is LilyPond text-based? I'm wondering if that influences the type of user who gravitates to using those tools, and how that correlates with whether they read the manual. I've tried none of them (I used the text-based version of MUP for what little setting I've done personally) and am curious.

[CHGiffen]

Finale and Sibelius employ a GUI ... so WYSIWYG is (approximately) the rule. LilyPond in its native form is text based, and I'm not sure if there are any GUI front ends for it. The Finale display is quite accurate with respect to the printed output (and one can elect to hide things for the printed output). It's definitely true that transposition in Finale is easy and requires little, if any, adjust afterwards (one might have to shift lyrics down a bit if a downward transposition pushes notes too far below the staves). I'm not experienced enough with Sibelius to comment on the problems raised in this thread.

Chuck