The way underrated software -i.e. Guitar Pro 8 - handles aligning given audio files is intuitive for transcribing music into professional notation.
How to set up and do it in dorico with comparable ease?
THX
Best
BX
@Flower, how is the procedure in Guitar Pro? Can you give a short explanation, so we can compare?
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There’s no feature for attaching audio files in Dorico in order to aid with transcription. It’s a feature we plan to add in future versions, but it’s not included in Dorico 5.
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I transcribe all the time in Dorico. There’s no way to sync a file in Dorico, but the great inexpensive program Transcribe can be controlled with MIDI foot pedals. I leave Transcribe open in the background, control the audio for it with my foot pedals, and write directly into Dorico which is active in the foreground.
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Not only does Guitar Pro allow attaching audio files to the score, but it allows rubber-band-like dragging of barlines in the score to the audio, to sync with drifting tempo map incredibly easily. It is not necessary to deal with separate automation-lane tempo maps, it is a direct manupulation of the bar line to sync with the audio incredibly easily. Did I mention it is incredibly easily done? Also also, it allows play looping, with either playback % rate control or BPM control, so that a small section of the piece can be studied/played-along to.
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this is exactly what Cubase does with the Warp tool (both in the tracks view and in key editor). In future I can see a similar approach for Dorico. Let’s give the Team time to develop this functionalities, and let’s enjoy the present functions of Dorico.
It does seem really super easy; hopefully they don’t have a patent pending 
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Reaper does similar, with stretch something-or-other; but, I don’t know how either of them seamlessly (…or not…) modify/stretch/shrink their score views and/or midi items to align with the audio. Reaper’s abilty to stretch bars/time is very good. Both are different than the exceptional nature of Guitar Pro’s feature described above, which is always the notational score view, while also providing a lower panel for an audio track (which allows a type of scrubbing) simultaneously synchronized to the score view.
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You can choose in Cubase on a track by track basis if it should follows the Musical (bars and beats) or Linear (seconds and frames etc.) based Warping (I hope I didn’t swap the two… 
) . And you can choose for audio various algorithms to stretch it. Very powerful.
vs.
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I forgot that I had made an original music video demo of doing this time-stretch in GP with audio. This might show it quite nicely. Here is my video demo where the Guitar Pro score can be seen along with the GP audio track in GP’s bottom panel. GP treats the audio file in its UI as if it is another ‘instrument’.
This was basically a lunchtime project for me. Famous Greek guitarist “Gus G” posted an unaccompanied guitar jam as youtube short, which I then took and dropped into Guitar Pro (as the extracted audio file), and then I orchestrated to his licks with percussion, bass, flute, etc. Then I screencaptured the GP playback, put all the media back into Reaper, and made this yt video.
The important aspect of this is that Gus G was playing in free time so his tempo varied significantly. The syncronization using GP’s stretched bars feature resulted in tempo map markers being created as often as every beat. The final result is that the notation and playback is perfectly MIDI sync’d to the guitar, and best of all, it is still notational music (not tetris blocks).
Because my youtube video was basically a lunchtime project to make a youtube short, I didnt finish the project in total, maybe someday I will get back to it and make a ‘full length’ arrangement. I was also hoping to export the MusicXML from GP and then write the final in Dorico, but… it may or may not be worth the investment to complete it as a Dorico piece compared to keeping it as a Guitar Pro piece.
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It’s perhaps churlish to observe… transcriptions are generally violations of copyright.
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Hey Janus!
That is a very important thing to take care for in a notation forum to point out, of course.
But:
you can teach with proper representations of music, as often the stuff you will find in the www. is not always relyable
OR
Imagine a musician that really is interested in how something is played and likes to produce scores just for fun.
No. The point is that “stuff” you find on the www is probably already stolen.
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That’s fine. The question then becomes should the Dorico team expend effort to create a tool to facilitate this?
There is a perfectly valid use for Producers who need to combine Audio and MIDI (as DAWs do with time warp etc.). I think the justification for Audio to Notation is less clear.
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…Janus. If you work for publishers, you give them properly typeset layouts…
You give orchestral layouts properly set. You give a BigBand properly set material.
Yes. And the publishers ensure you have the rights to do so…
(I think this debate has run its course)
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Melody and Lyrics are subject to royalties due to copyright. Contrafacts are not violations of copyright and neither are their transcriptions. Percussion is not either. Transcriptions are often done of harmony, not only of the top line. In my Gus G example, historically it has not been subject to royalty from copyright because it is a guitar accompaniment (and my topline melody is original), however in recent years it is probably a gray area, because a jury in the USA might likely decide that “the guitar lick is not the topline melody but it represents the song enough to be equal in value” as it has been found in recent cases.
The most frequent educational assignment for any music student is transcription, and an excellent exercise for any composer is transcription, which is not subject to copyright at all, as it is educational use, and only would get attention if the result was published in significant volumes.
Synchronization of audio and video is subject to different rules and any visual synchronized to audio means they are both required to have royalties for copyright. Regardless, youtube literally promotes theft in this regard, and purposely does not enforce this, and always has promoted theft, even back to the original “Prince Dancing Baby” music synchronization/royalty case.
It is ridiculous to assert that transcription functionality “should not be implemented” in software simply because some transcriptions are subject to copyright royalty which the transcriber may not properly register to pay.
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THX everybody!
Have a nice weekend!
Transcriptions done by students that aren’t resold, posted with the audio, or otherwise disseminated, are certainly legal and as @superblonde mentioned are one of the best ways for students to learn, especially in jazz. I’m teaching a masters-level Improv course this semester, and one of the big projects I assign is a “transcription project” where the students pick an artist and have to do 8 solo transcriptions by their chosen artist. I have to grade it of course, so that basically means I have to do 72 transcriptions (8 transcriptions x 9 students) myself this semester just to keep up with them. (And of course I’m doing quite a few more myself to present to class.)
There is quite a lot of gray area legally with transcriptions, but transcriptions I have done myself (i.e. not from another published source such as the Charlie Parker Omnibook) that are used in a classroom setting and not sold or posted publicly online, certainly are covered by the “fair use” doctrine in the US. All the YouTube transcriptions with a solo and the audio, likely are in violation because the audio is posted, but as there’s no $$$ involved, usually the worst that happens is a DCMA takedown request. In all honesty, with a handful of exceptions for a few excellent transcribers, most transcribed solos posted online seem to be done by deaf high school kids and are fairly worthless anyways.
Transcribe is a really great program, and it would be amazing if many of its features could be (licensed?) integrated into Dorico in a way that could link bars to specific points in the audio file. In case any devs read this, the features that I consider essential with Transcribe include:
1) Adjustable playback speed. I assume this one is obvious, but the ability to set custom playback speeds is essential. I typically use 70 or 80%, but for really fast passages sometimes have to slow down to 50%. I burned out two Marantz half-speed tape players transcribing stuff when I was in college in the 90s.
2) Adjustable playback pitch. Lots of recordings aren’t A440, especially bootlegs that were originally recorded on tape, so the ability to modify the playback to be in tune is certainly important.
3) Adjustable octaves. This may not seem that important, but the ability to transpose everything up an octave into the Alvin & the Chipmunks range makes transcribing bass lines really easy. Bass lines often get lost in the mud, and if using a piano with stretch tuning, hearing things down there gets really tricky. A simple octave transposition of the audio clarifies a lot in the low register.
4) Foot pedal transport control. As I mentioned earlier in the thread, I control Transcribe with my MIDI foot pedals while it is in the background. I would hate to lose the ability to control the transport if this ever gets adopted into Dorico.
5) Some sort of spectrum analysis. I hate to even suggest this, as 99% of the time it’s worthless (and chord symbol analysis is worthless 100% of the time unless using very simple harmonies), but on occasion this has helped me hear an inner voicing on a big band transcription that I was struggling to hear. If a feature has to be left out, I’m fine with this one as it’s not essential, but it falls into the “it would be nice if …” category.
I already have a pretty good workflow with Dorico and Transcribe, but I imagine this would be a pretty big selling point from a marketing perspective. I think that there are actually a lot of users that would use this!
My own goal (pun intended) as an educator is to make myself irrelevant, LOL! If I can teach students how to go get the information and analyze it themselves, then I’ve been successful. Critics/academics are always a generation or two behind the musicians that are actually creating music, so I always tell my students that once they are out of school, if they want to figure out what current musicians are doing, they have to go figure it out themselves. Transcription is the way to do that.
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