Applications

COPYIST ALSO CONVERTS sequencer song files into music notation, which will probably find more use than entering transcriptions into the editor. It currently supports files from such American programs as Texture, Sequencer+ and MasterTracks, with conversion routines included to allow them to be loaded into Copyist. The problem with loading in a sequencer pattern or keyboard performance is that the computer can be all too literal in gauging your performance - though this problem is one all scoring programs have to solve, not just the Copyist.

For instance, how accurate are you in playing and releasing eighth-notes? Perhaps the computer feels you released a few of them too soon to be considered eighths, and so transcribes them as 16ths. So you'll need to spend some additional time editing the sequence after you've loaded it in.

This is not really the fault of Copyist; it does a good job of faithfully reproducing your performance, and allows you to adjust default settings (include or exclude) for parameters such as rests, dots, stems or beams, or whatever. But you can get a pretty odd-looking score after you first load it in, with 64th-note rests and 16ths instead of eighths.

You can change the note quantisation amount to different variables, which solves some of this problem. It's a neat idea and a handy way to cut down re-editing time, but you'll probably have to do some tweaking before you have a score you're happy with.

Testing

WHICH BRINGS US to the final evaluation, printing out the finished piece of music. Currently, Copyist supports several output formats: Epson (or an Epson-compatible printer), HP Inkjet or Laserjet+ printer, and HP-GL compatible plotter. I used a regular Epson printer, not having immediate access to an HP Ink/Laserprinter.

The Epson configuration prints out in either a high-resolution mode, in which the quality is greatly increased due to continuous passing of the print head, or a regular mode, which decreases the resolution but speeds up the print process dramatically.

This final point brings me to my third and most major complaint. No, it's not the quality of the printed page - the music is very crisply defined and more than adequate for publication or archive purposes. (In fact, I saw the Laserprinter output of Copyist at the NAMM show in January, and could not tell the difference between it and a page of sheet music or any professional publication.) But the time it takes to print out a single page of music on a dot-matrix printer can make the program almost unusable.

"When loading in a sequencer pattern or keyboard performance, the computer can be all too literal in gauging your performance - a problem all scoring programs have to solve."

How long, you ask? Well, in regular mode on an Epson printer, it took 8½ minutes to print out the first page of the demo song file included with the program. And in hi-res mode, it took over half-an-hour. For one page of music. Honestly, I thought there was something wrong with my printer, when I accessed printing in hi-res.

Now, you can multiply this out as quickly as I can, and when you do you'll discover it's going to take an hour to print out two pages of music, two hours for four pages, and so on.

Although it speeds things up threefold to use regular mode, waiting half-an-hour for the printer to produce three pages of music is beyond the borders of acceptably from my point of view.

In fairness, a Laserprinter can produce a very high-quality page of music in minutes, but how many musicians have access to one?

Verdict

A PROFESSIONAL COPYIST, the good ol' human variety, would run rings around this program. Even an amateur copyist, or your average working musician, could easily write out a page of music faster than it would take to print out a page with a dot-matrix printer, much less edit that page as well. (By the way, I'm not comparing Copyist to any other scoring program on the market; my evaluations are based solely on my experience with computers as a subject, music as an art, and transcription as a necessary administrative duty.)

So now the questions posed at the beginning of this review should be asked again. Does the program make the process of music transcription simpler, with greater speed and quality the results? In other words, does it make the musician's job any easier?

Unfortunately, the answer is no. Transcription is actually much easier the old-fashioned way, by hand. It's much quicker, and the editing tools (pencil and eraser) are a lot more user-friendly than those provided with this software package. The one function that might have sped up a copyist's work, a transposition feature, is only included in a roundabout way (move notes vertically one staff at a time and then readjust the key signatures).

So if you are a professional copyist looking for a way of easing your work load, keep looking.

If you regularly hire copyists to write out parts for you, have the time and effort to invest in learning to use the program, already own a PC (or ST), and use a PC-based (or ST-based) sequencer, it's conceivable you could make the Copyist a cost-effective investment.

And if you just want to have fun with a program that will print out music that you can input, either by hand/mouse or from a sequencer file, check out some of the consumer-based programs I mentioned above, if you can find them.

Copyist is an admirable effort, but sadly, it falls short of its mark.

Price £250 including VAT

More from Take Note, (Contact Details)