14. Bringing music in

PDFs and Read Music

A PDF exported by a notation or tab app holds the music as drawn lines and letters, and Stab reads them back: the notes and their rhythm, the TAB’s frets, drums, and the words on the page. A scanned PDF holds pictures of its pages instead, and Stab reads those too, as it reads photos. The PDF stays with the song, beside it, so you can check what was read against the page.

PDFs and Read Music

Available on every platform.

What Stab reads

Stab reads PDFs made by an app (exported or printed to PDF from a notation or tab program, Stab included), and scanned PDFs. On their pages it reads:

• Notation: clefs, key and time signatures, notes and rests in up to two voices a staff, accidentals, tuplets, ties, a pickup bar, repeats and endings, tempo marks.
• TAB: the frets on each string, and the tuning when the page says it. TAB printed alone, with its rhythm under the staff, is read too.
• Drums, on a percussion staff.
• The page’s words: the title, lyrics, chord symbols and section names.

Parts that run across systems and pages are joined into one track each.

Opening a PDF

1. Choose Open… (⌘O)Open… (Ctrl+O)Import… from the File menu, or Import a File under Bring a Song In on the home. On the home, under Bring a Song In, choose Import a File.
2. Pick the PDF.

The song opens with the Score on the left and an Image pane on the right showing the PDF’s pages, the two linked. A message says how many bars were read, and how many to check. The song goes into your library like any import, named after the title on the first page, else the file.On the web the song opens as a demo to try; Keep It in Stab Cloud when you leave it keeps it (see The Welcome demo).

Checking what was read

Reading printed music isn’t perfect, and Stab tells you where it was less sure:

• The Image pane outlines the bars to check on the page, and the message as the song opens says how many there are.
• Next Bar to Check goes to each in turn.
• Review takes you through them one at a time (below).
• In the Editor, Colour Notes By › Confidence colours each note by how sure the reading was.

Compare a bar with the page, play it, and fix what’s wrong as you would any note. Editing a note in a bar marked to check marks it checked.

Reviewing what was read

Available on every platform.

Review shows the bars to check one at a time, each beside its region on the page: the Score or Editor beside the Image pane goes to the bar, and the page scrolls to it and outlines it. Start it with Review at the foot of the Image pane after a read, Review Read Bars in the Edit menu, Review in the message after opening a PDF, or Review Read Bars in the Image pane’s menu.

A strip along the Image pane’s top says where you are (“Review · 3 of 9”) and offers, for the bar shown:

• Accept: the bar is right as it is; it’s no longer marked to check, and Review moves on.
• Fix: Review waits at the bar with its notes selected, and the Score pane takes the keyboard. Edit it with the Score’s tools, then choose Resume Review (on the pill over the Score, the strip, or the menus) to carry on.
• Re-read: the bar’s region of the page is read again, alone.
• Leave Empty: a rest of the bar’s length, still marked to check.
• Use the New Reading: for a bar you had edited before a page or clip was read again, the new reading kept aside for it.
• ‹ and › step back and on; Done ends Review.

Each of these is one undo step. While Review runs, keys act in any pane of the song: Return accepts, the arrows step, Escape ends it, and F, R, E and N fix, re-read, leave empty and use the new reading. Stepping past the last bar ends Review and says how many are still to check.

The Image pane

Available on every platform.

An Image pane shows one of a song’s documents: a PDF, or photos of printed music. A song opened from a PDF gets one by itself; in any other song, make a pane an Image pane from its kind (Panes) and add a document to it.

Reading along

The pages run one under the other. Scroll through them, and pinch to zoom, or use Zoom In and Zoom Out in the pane’s menu. The bar at the caret is outlined on the page. Linked to the Editor or the Score by a link colour, the pane follows their caret, and a click on a bar of the page puts their caret on it. Holding the pointer over a note of the page says what was read there.

The pane’s menu

Right-click the pane for its menu:

• Read Music, Read All Pages (a document of two pages or more), Read Music in Region, Read Music as Clip, Re-read Clip, Clear Region: see below.
• Ignore Region, Remove Ignore Zone, Remove Ignore Zones on This Page: see below.
• Reading Options: Keep the Page’s Layout, Unsure Bars and Repeats, as above.
• Next Bar to Check, Review Read Bars (Resume Review while you fix a bar), End Review.
• Follow the Caret, Fit Width, Zoom In, Zoom Out.
• Show › Bars to Check, and for photos Original Photos and Outline Staves. With Show Reading Details on in Settings (Score › Reading Printed Music), Show adds every layer of what Read Music saw and made of the page (staves, symbols, confidence, text, the reading, the clean-up), and the pointer says what each symbol became.
• Export Page with Layers…: a picture of the page with what’s drawn over it, to send when Stab read something wrong.
• The song’s documents, to show another; Add Document… to add a PDF or pictures; Remove Document.

A document is kept inside the song’s file. Adding or removing one isn’t an undo step.

Read Music

Read Music reads a page, or a part of one, into the song you’re working on:

1. Show the page in the Image pane, and put the caret where the music should go (in another pane, or by clicking a bar of the page).
2. To read only part of the page, drag a rectangle round it: drag with the mouse.
3. From the pane’s menu, choose Read Music at the Caret (Read Music in a song with no notes yet), or Read Music in Region.

What’s read goes in as one undo step. Into a song with no notes, every part read becomes a track, with its time signature, tempo and key. Into a song with notes, the part that suits the caret’s track (tab on a fretted track, keys on keys, drums on drums) goes there from the caret’s bar, in a clip of its own; where a clip is already there, it goes on a new voice, so nothing is written over. Read All Pages reads every page of the document into the song, joined across the page turns.

Read Music as Clip reads the region into a new clip on the caret’s track at the caret’s bar, as long as the bars read, writing over nothing. The clip remembers where on the page it came from: holding the pointer over it outlines its region on the page, and Re-read Clip (the clip’s menu, or the Image pane’s with the clip picked) reads it again. Reading a page, a region or a clip again replaces only the bars you haven’t edited since; a bar you edited is kept, and Review offers the new reading of it.

Ignore zones

Some things on a page aren’t music to read: a heading, a handwritten note, a picture, a stamp. Drag a region round one and choose Ignore Region from the pane’s menu: it becomes a grey hatched box marked “Ignored”, and Read Music leaves out what’s under it. Click a zone to pick it, drag it to move it, or drag a corner to resize it; Remove Ignore Zone (or Delete) removes it. Zones are kept with the page in the song, and each change is one undo step. A photo takes zones once its page is cleaned.