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 Designing Music Books
Author: Sean.Perrin 
Date:   2012-02-08 15:56

Good morning all.

I have been trying to make some music books/worksheets for my students but I'm having little success. What software to people make music worksheets and books in? I'm using Sibelius 7 and Apple Pages in tandem (importing graphics from the Sibelius Score), but it seems very difficult. If I want to make a slight change to something, I have to go back into Sibelius and re-import the graphic.

It's a nightmare... this can't be what publishers do. Is there a way to stay in Sibelius and have large blocks of text and just insert music samples where needed?

I realize this isn't the best forum for this, but this is all we have!

Founder and host of the Clarineat Podcast: http://www.clarineat.com

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 Re: Designing Music Books
Author: dansil 
Date:   2012-02-08 22:31

I suspect that if you want to use professional publishing software you'll pay heaps and it probably will have a very steep learning curve anyway!

Apple's Pages program is a delight to use and so much easier to use than more upmarket programs such as Adobe's InDesign. To get music out of Sibelius and into a format you can import into Pages where you have your text, you can use "Grab", the simple screen capture program in Apples Utilities folder to capture either an entire window's contents or whatever you select by clicking and dragging OR hit Print and then save as PDF and import the PDF into Pages.

You're probably doing all of this anyway but clearly you first need to get the music finished to perfection within Sbielius.

There's no easier path than the software you have on your Apple plus iWork which includes Pages.

Danny Silver

a family doctor in Castlemaine, rural Victoria, Australia for the past 30+ years, also a plucked string musician (mandolin, classical guitar) for far too long before discovering the clarinet - what a missed opportunity!

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 Re: Designing Music Books
Author: Sean.Perrin 
Date:   2012-02-10 17:57

There must be a better way than this...

Founder and host of the Clarineat Podcast: http://www.clarineat.com

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 Re: Designing Music Books
Author: tictactux 2017
Date:   2012-02-10 18:39

I think - regardless of the software being used - the trick is not to import the pictures with the score "as a picture" but merely "as a link" to the picture in question. That way you can update the graphics and - more or less - just reprint the book, as it will be assembled only during printing.

You buy this kind of luxury with a slightly more cluttered document folder as there might be bunches and bunches of image files along the main document file. (similar to a html document with pictures and text)

--
Ben

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 Re: Designing Music Books
Author: Sean.Perrin 
Date:   2012-02-11 00:06

Hmm... I have a couple good leads. I'll post back if I can figure something out.

Thanks!

Founder and host of the Clarineat Podcast: http://www.clarineat.com

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 Re: Designing Music Books
Author: kdk 
Date:   2012-02-11 03:03

Sean, I don't have the facility in Sibelius that others may have, but what you want can be done in Finale relatively easily, so I have to assume there's a way in Sibelius as well, since the two programs seem to try very hard to mirror each others' features.

In Finale you'd simply put extra space between the staves where you want text to appear, then place a text box in the space and type in your text. As I remember (I haven't used it in awhile) you can import graphics into the empty space as well. At the end of the process you can print to paper and also to a PDF so students can read the pages on a computer screen if they like.

Sibelius must be able to do this, but someone else will have to supply the details.

Karl

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 Re: Designing Music Books
Author: Ken Shaw 2017
Date:   2012-02-11 14:47

Sean -

Be grateful you didn't work in publishing in 1969 (when I started). It was all Linotype, with hand-engraved musical excerpts, or at best (actually second-best), done on the music typewriter . You ended up with "repro" type, printed in ink on shiny (and eminently smudgeable) paper, which you pasted down on cardboard with rubber cement or (if you were moderately wealthy) adhesive wax.

It ain't easy climbing the steep Sibelius or Finale learning curves, but doing it by hand on a complex page easily took an hour, and that's if you didn't want to make changes.

Odesk has contractors, many in Bulgaria, who do skilled work, such as music MS to Sibelius, at extremely low hourly rates https://www.odesk.com/contractors/skill/music-engraving/.

Ken Shaw

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 Re: Designing Music Books
Author: Sean.Perrin 
Date:   2012-02-19 21:37

If anyone is interested I found an unbelievably fantastic solution that is EXACTLY what I wanted.

In Sibelius, export the graphic (or selection, whatever it is) as a vector graphic.

Place the graphic in InDesign and format exactly how you like.

Now, as tictatux mentioned above: If you organize your files properly, InDesign REFERENCES the source file and updates if changes are made to it. If I need to edit the item in Sibelius I do so, re-export the graphic in such a way that it re-writes the original file and voila, InDesign automatically takes care of the rest. The only "difficult" part of all this is keeping organized document folders and referencing the files properly. Hardly a pain when compared to what I was doing before.

Fantastic.

Founder and host of the Clarineat Podcast: http://www.clarineat.com

Post Edited (2012-02-19 21:41)

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