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How is hairpiin playback supposed to work?

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How is hairpiin playback supposed to work?

Postby wilhoit » Sat Jun 07, 2014 3:30 pm

Does each hairpin only go up or down one notch regardless of any explicit dynamic at its end? Or is there a problem with hairpins longer than one bar? I often write hairpins that go from, say, pp to f over two or three bars. What I get on playback is no *obvious* change along the way, then a sudden adoption of the explicit dynamic at the end. It is quite possible that it is going from pp to p over three bars then jumping to f, I might not hear that. Shorter hairpins that span multiple dynamic levels (e.g. ff down to p) seem to work, but my ears may be playing a different sort of trick on me there.

I predict that I will be asked for an exmaple file and will generate one if necessary, but you ought to be able to tell me what is *expected* to happen without that.

Thanks,
FW
.
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Re: How is hairpiin playback supposed to work?

Postby kmlandre » Mon Jun 09, 2014 1:32 pm

Hi FW-

See this post, as I suspect you're running into the same problem:

http://forum.notionmusic.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=6192

Kurt M. Landre'
https://www.SoundCloud.com/kmlandre
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Re: How is hairpin playback supposed to work?

Postby wilhoit » Mon Jun 09, 2014 3:03 pm

A good suggestion. Mostly, I *think*, my explicit dynamics are associated with the note *after* the last note of the hairpin. I am mostly dealing with files imported via MusicXML. When I enter music directly into NOTION, I think the habit that I am forming is (1) note with explicit start dynamic and hairpin start; (2) some other notes; (3) note with hairpin end; (4) note with explicit new dynamic. I read you saying that that pattern is risky at best and possibly simply wrong. I'll make some experiments and advise the results.

I can't even be sure that (3) and (4) above are actually different, because I don't know what is happening when I rubberband a hairpin with the mouse. Is it "attaching", with each jump, to the note *after* its visual end? As collision avoidance will retract the hairpin away from a dynamic mark, is there a good way to see exactly which note the end is attached to? (I purposely neglect the issue of what may happen when a hairpin is visually fine-tuned with the handles.)

Thanks,
FW
.
Frank Wilhoit
Notion 4 / Windows 8.1
Bundled sounds + Woodwind extensions
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Re: How is hairpiin playback supposed to work?

Postby wilhoit » Tue Jun 10, 2014 7:21 pm

Okay, so we've surfaced a larger issue here, which is the handling of dynamics on staves that use multiple voices.

As near as I can tell, if you do not use multiple voices ANYWHERE on a particular staff, then you can put your dynamics below or above, it makes no difference.

But if multiple voices are used anywhere on a staff, then even in passages where the upper voice is the only one that has notes, its dynamics must be placed above or they are not rendered for playback.

Also, it is no good attaching the dynamic above and then moving it below using the context menu (or vice versa); what you see is what you get.

I am just going through a fairly large score moving MOST of the wind dynamics above the staff so that they play back. The result would make an engraver weep, even if the said engraver were momentarily sober (thought experiment, people). It's worth it, because the audio rendering is potentially vastly better than can be gotten out of either of The Competitors; but it's putting paid to my dream of making audio renderings from the engraving score....
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Re: How is hairpiin playback supposed to work?

Postby idiotSavant » Tue Jun 10, 2014 11:09 pm

wilhoit wrote:But if multiple voices are used anywhere on a staff, then even in passages where the upper voice is the only one that has notes, its dynamics must be placed above or they are not rendered for playback.


This is my understanding as well. I've spent countless lost hours painfully reproducing hairpins and dynamics from below to above and vice versa, since there's no way to copy and paste selected items (hint for a feature request here).

It would be nice to hear from Admin: IS this a known issue? Is it being addressed in the upcoming Notion 5?
Michael

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Re: How is hairpiin playback supposed to work?

Postby wilhoit » Wed Jun 11, 2014 10:36 am

...aaaaand I've found a counterexample! My previous comments were made on the basis of my woodwind parts and those comments still stand, but the horn parts are behaving differently. On the first horn staff (Horns I/II), there is only one bar (out of 188) in which multiple voices are used and there are no dynamic markings at all in that particular measure. With the horns, UNLIKE the woodwind, the dynamics have to be below or they don't work. With each of the woodwind parts, there is at least one place where BOTH criteria apply: (A) two voices and (B) dynamic markings on at least one voice. Perhaps it is the coincidence of those two triggers.

The authors ought to be able to tell us how this is *expected* to work -- even if the behavior is a side effect of other design decisions.
Frank Wilhoit
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Re: How is hairpiin playback supposed to work?

Postby wilhoit » Wed Jun 11, 2014 2:15 pm

It gets worse, I'm afraid.

I've gotten down into the strings. At one point I found the violas refusing to render dynamics. I backtracked until I found a single "pp" above the staff, everything before that having been below. Dynamics after that "pp" were only rendered if they were placed above. I then moved the "pp" itself below, and everything worked.

AHA, I thought: it can chase from lower to upper, but it can't chase from upper to lower!

But it (whatever it is) is not so simple or so consistent as all that. I tried moving another randomly-chosen single dynamic above, later in the part. No boggle.

I'm trying to guess what the coders were thinking and what kinds of logic errors^H^H^H^H^H^Hidiosyncrasies might have resulted from a mindset that the "upper" or "first" voice is somehow special or privileged. But if it is not even consistent within the same staff of the same score, then it seems like a different kind of thing: some kind of setting that is sticky but shouldn't be, maybe.

If it were just a little more consistent and reproducible, it could be filed as a bug.... :|
Frank Wilhoit
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Re: How is hairpiin playback supposed to work?

Postby idiotSavant » Wed Jun 11, 2014 9:40 pm

And have you tried DIFFERENT dynamics for an upper voice and a lower voice? This seems to work ok for me... sometimes...

I've taken to the practice that whenever I have an issue, I just duplicate all dynamics above and below the staff for all staves. Twice the effort? It sure is!

Bug? You bet!
Michael

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Re: How is hairpiin playback supposed to work?

Postby jeffreyhall » Thu Jun 12, 2014 4:14 pm

Musescore has a feature that lets you inspect the properties of each note. It would be great if Notion let you right-click on a note head and find out what MIDI volume or velocity Notion interprets it as having. I like Notion, but it can be very frustrating to look my music and not have any idea how the software will interpret it.
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