Wow! After reading about your situation, my emotions are trying to multitask big-time!

Here’s something you may want to try to tide you over until Uncle Dave and the other generous members of this forum can get a system together for you.

Go to Myriad Software’s Web site. This is a French company created and run by two brilliant brothers (the Guillion Brothers) who are outstanding musicians and programmers. They make several pieces of software, all of which you can download free limited-functionality versions of off of the site. All of their software is available for Mac OS 8, 9, and X, as well as all modern versions of Windows.

Melody Assistant and Harmony Assistant are the two main music programs. Harmony does everything that Melody does, and then some. Even so, it lists for only $68. Melody is only $15! Those were not typos: I did not forget any digits!

Both include their own software synthesizer so you’re not dependent on the sound quality of the MIDI part of your PC sound card, though you can use that, too, and even combine them (have some tracks played by the Myriad softsynth, and some by the PC MIDI, and even some by external MIDI devices such as that keyboard Uncle Dave is gonna get you such a great deal on). Both will allow MIDI input, so once you have the keyboard, you can use it for music entry. But both will also work just fine with no music keyboard at all! You can use the mouse and/or computer keyboard for note entry. Back to the Myriad soft-synth: three GM and GS-compatible soundbases are available: a “lite” one that comes with the program to get you started, and two larger ones available for free on the Web site and on CD (respectively — but that one also can be downloaded from another site, with the Guillion Brothers’ full blessings) to improve the sound quality. And yes, you can “roll your own” and modify existing instruments or record your own multi-sampled instruments! It also has a powerful digital effects capability, with Reverbs, Distortions, Flanging, Delays, Choruses, etc., all parametrically controllable to your heart’s content!

The sheer power of even Melody Assistant is mind-boggling. It does notation (not quite engraver quality, but good enough for casual use), including the ability to export scores as Macintosh PICTs, Windows WMF/EMF, .EPS (PostScript), etc. for incorporation into graphics and page layout software! It can export its audio playback as .WAV, .AIFF, or even .MP3, right from the program with no need for an external MP3 encoder software! And, of course, it can export standard Type 0 or 1 SMF MIDI files, as well as .KARaoke and .ABC and other common karaoke formats.

The demo version even allows you to save your work! It has limited export capabilities, and printouts will have a watermark placed over them until you register the software. It also won’t allow you to enter time or key signature changes, but you can use other MIDI software to set up a file with the appropriate signature changes and import that. Of course all such limitations go away when you do register.

It has an incredible variety of musical notation capabilities, including being able to do both chord grids and tablatures for nearly every stringed instrument imaginable (including dozens of guitar tunings beyond the usual EADGBE), etc. It knows how to do Gregorian chant notation! It knows how to handle transposing instruments such as Bb Trumpet. It can mix audio recording in with the generated music, in multiple tracks, so, yes, you and your brothers can sing to your music and record the results (and the whole thing can be exported to .MP3, etc.)!

Or, you can let it do its own singing! Virtual Singer is an add-on module to either Melody or Harmony that costs $15, but a demo version comes with both programs. The only limit of the demo is that it will only generate a certain (generous) amount of synthesized vocals per session of the progam and once that runs out, all you have to do is quit the program and re-launch it to reset the counter to 100%. Virtual Singer will actually sing the lyrics on staves with lyrics, using synthesized voices that you can do incredible control over in terms of the tonality of the voice, the way it does vibrato, scooping, sliding, virtual Choir size, etc., human-like inaccuracies in note timing, pitch, etc.. All this in several languages, including both UK and US accents of English! You can even have multiple singers at once! You can let it deduce the pronunciation of syllables using its own text-to-speech (which usually does a quite good job), or specify your own pronunciation either with phonetic spelling or by using SAMPA notation (like the International Phonetic Alphabet but using only the ASCII character set) without affecting how the lyrics print or show up on the screen or in karaoke software. You can position each of your Virtual Singers on a “stage” to control where they sound in the stereo field and how loud or soft they are compared to other Singers.

The latest version, 2.0, includes Real Singer technology, which adds the ability to analyze a real human voice (from microphone input of the desired person speaking each of the available phonemes of the desired language[s]), and generates a new voice from that that can be used like any other Virtual Singer voice! You and your brothers can use your own voices to set up Real Singer, and be able to hear somewhat how a new musical creation of yours will sound even before you get together to sing it!

Melody also supports Alternative Tunings, so you can experiment with scale-based Just Intonation, Horntones, and other tunings beyond the usual 12-tone Even Tempered scale.

Harmony does all of this (including the ability to host Virtual Singer), plus the ability to edit in Page Layout mode (so you see the music how it will print even as you edit it), Engraver mode (better spacing of notes for quality sheet music printouts), plus has its own chord-based accompaniment features similar to the auto-accompaniment sections of the sort of arranger workstation keyboards discussed in this Forum! It has a variety of styles and you can make your own! It will even auto-detect the chords based on the notes you enter (by any means) or play on a keyboard, or even import from a MIDI file or some such, so you can quickly and easily overlay auto-accompaniment to an existing composition! You can also manually override any auto-detected chords as you see fit.

The demo version of Harmony, unlike Melody, does not enable you to save your work. It is not a shareware program, as Melody is. Both use the same file formats, so a song created in Melody can be used in Harmony, and vice-versa.

Another add-on program for both Melody and Harmony is OMeR, which is basically OCR for sheet music. If you have a scanner, you can actually scan in sheet music and OMeR will output special music files for Melody / Harmony. This too costs $15, and its demo version restriction is that any file made by the demo version of OmER can be viewed and played, but not changed, in even a registered version of Melody or Harmony. Of all the Myriad software that I’ve tried, this is the only one I’ve been significantly disappointed in. The accuracy is not really good enough to be useful, at least in my experience. Your source sheet music must be absolutely clean and pristine for best results (and don’t even think about using it to scan some sheet music someone FAXed you!) and even then the accuracy isn’t all that great.

A free Netscape-style Web plugin lets you post sheet music made by Myriad software on your Web site, where other people can see and hear it in all its glory, including with Virtual Singer, without having to have the software, and without having to download megabytes of MP3 or other audio. Even with Virtual Singer staves, a typical .MUS file is only a few tens of kilobytes long! (Files with digitally recorded audio tracks and/or custom-sampled instruments will, of course, be longer.)

When you go to the Web site, first download “Download Assistant,” which is an automatic download utility specifically for their software. It is very small and will download very quickly, and then handle the download and installation of any of their other software, including the ability to resume an interrupted download from where it left off. All this without installing ad-displaying, privacy-violating, and system-destablizing hidden SpyWare like GetRight, GoZilla!, Netscape Download, RealDownload, etc. all do.

I think the Myriad software would be a great and inexpensive way for you to get started.

[This message has been edited by COMALite J (edited 02-07-2002).]