Nightingale 4.0

BIRD LIVES!

NightingaleŽ flying high after dining on bugs!

Also available is NightLight, our new freeware version of Nightingale. To download, check out www.ngale.com. This is a great opportunity to try out Nightingale, and particularly for students to possess this fine music notation tool.

Created by music-notation software expert Don Byrd, Nightingale has long been a primary choice for musicians in need of software capable of publisher quality output. Since receiving an Electronic Musician 1997 Editors' Choice Award and 4 stars from Macworld several years ago, work on Nightingale has progressed at a slower pace than we would all have liked, although development never stopped. Now, however, we have redoubled our efforts to produce two new releases: first the freeware NightLight, which includes virtually all the features of its larger sibling (but with a limit of 4 page scores and 9 stave systems), and now, a new full featured version 4.0 with a host of new features and bug fixes.

Why use Nightingale? 1) As a professional score/parts preparer, I believe Nightingale is one of the handful of notation programs with publisher quality output; indeed, I have seen parts from our program in front of prestigious ensembles such as the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Kronos Quartet. 2) Although Nightingale is a full featured program with the potential for solving complex notational problems, it is relatively simple to learn and use - A boon for teachers looking to equip classes of all ages. 3) Nightingale achieves its fine output without excessive memory or storage requirements, a consideration for owners of older machines. 4) Finally, we believe Nightingale makes a more coherent use of the Mac's user interface than any of our competitors.

NOW Only $85

Changes to Nightingale from version 3.5 through 4.0, as of August 22, 2000:

NEW FEATURES

• Clickable editing of timesigs, keysigs, modifiers and dynamics.
• Nightingale is (finally) PPC native.
• Parts can now be deleted (in master page) even if they are not empty.
• There is now a "Distribute Staves Evenly" command in Master Page.
• Undo now works on the move measures/systems up/down, paste system and fill empty measures commands.
• Extracting parts now allows for a selection of parts to be extracted and is no longer a one or all proposition.
• Nightingale now displays elapsed time since the beginning of the score (in ticks) in the Get Info dialog for notes/rests.
• In Score Info, check for and report duration problems unless the shift key is down (checking can take a few seconds with a long score, so expert users might want to skip it).
• In Pianoroll view, made the lengths of bars (which are proportional to play duration) scalable via a user-settable resource, with a setting to always draw just round blobs, and a default that gives shorter bars than previously.
• Added a Close All command to the File menu.
• Add control of spacing between hyphens in Flow-In Text to the user-settable CNFG resource.
• Removed support of Built in Midi-Driver because of incompatibilities with new Operating Systems. Open Midi Systems (OMS) required for now.
• Doubled the limit on note/rests from 32767 to 65435, which affects super-large scores only.

BUG FIXES

• Removed inappropriate restriction on Double: formerly Ngale refused to Double if *any* staff contained cross-staff beams, slurs or tuplets, even if those staves were not in either the source or destination parts. Now it refuses only if the cross-staff objects are in the relevant parts.
• Fixed bug: Several operations--extracting parts and Clipboard operations among them--can produce corrupted object lists, potentially leading to unopenable files.
• Fixed bug: Centering of whole-measure rests now takes into account keysigs and timesigs in the measure; Also, multi-bar rests are centered more effectively.
• Fixed bug: If you Move Up a measure containing a note tied back to the end of the previous system and if there is a 'bad' slur, deleting that note gives an error message, sometimes followed by crash or freeze.
• Fixed bug: Adding an octave sign to a series of beamed chords or dyads often caused serious problems. (The triggering condition was when the interval between the outer notes of the chord was the same as the default stem length, normally an octave.)
• Fixed bug: Nightingale was using MIDI channel 1 under OMS, regardless of the part's setting, if the score had been saved when not using OMS, or if the device saved with the score is not present in the current OMS studio configuration. This affected playback and the Instrument MIDI Settings and Master Page Instrument dialogs.
• Fixed bug: If a cleared/cut selection contained a clef or keysig change, then undoing would not restore subsequent clefs and keysigs affected by the change.
• Fixed bug: Fixed various Move Measures Down bugs that could bite when the terminating barline of the upper system was selected before invoking the command.
• Fixed bug: If Beam-by-beat needed to unbeam first, undoing the autobeaming didn't restore the previous beams.

Changes to Nightingale from version 3.0 through 3.5:

• There's now an 'Open Notelist' command (the inverse of Save Selection Notelist).
• There's now an 'Add Redundant Accidentals' command (the inverse of Delete Redundant Accidentals).
• Nightingale now knows about chord frames (for guitar and similar instruments): there's a tool in the palette to insert them from a chord-frame font, and the font and size can be selected with NightCustomizer. NB: the only chord-frame font we know of is Coda's Seville.
• The QuickChange command has a new option for barlines, to set their type (single, double, repeat-to-left, etc.).
• In very long time signatures--4/2 and longer--you can now tell Nightingale (via NightCustomizer) whether you want a breve rest or a standard whole rest.
• For endings, the label can now be a string of characters (for example,"1.2.") instead of just a number.
• The 'Open Finale ETF File' command now handles ETF files through Finale version 3.5.
• To facilitate making beams sit/straddle/hang, when a beam handle is dragged, Nightingale now optionally "snaps" the beam's endpoint to the nearest position on a grid. Also, the command key reverses the effect of the setting. (This option is set with NightCustomizer.)
• On leaving Master Page, if the changes result in either systems dangling off the page or contents dangling off the systems, Nightingale now gives you a choice of keeping the changes without reformatting.
• On Extract Part, after reformatting, Nightingale now deletes redundant time signatures that are the same on all staves: these often result from anticipatory time signatures at ends of systems.
• It's now possible to set measure-number positions individually, via Get Info, on the barline they're attached to.
• In Master Page>Group Parts, Nightingale now gives you the choice of a (square) bracket or a (curly) brace to connect the group.
• There's now an "on Save, make a backup copy" option, with a checkbox in the Preferences dialog to turn it on and off.
• On a click to insert a double bar or repeat bar, Nightingale now asks the user if they want it to be a barline or not (replacing the little-noticed checkbox in Preferences).
• For Import MIDI File, Nightingale can now handle much larger files than earlier versions, and the more RAM that's available, the larger the file it can handle.
• There's now an option, set via NightCustomizer, to draw a slash on the stem of the 1st grace note of every beamed group, as well as on unbeamed gracenotes.
• Notelist files now include tuplets and clefs.
• The Reformat dialog now has a box for entering the extra margin for the top of the first page: this works the same way as the similar Preference setting. (If you want to change the top margin but don't want reformatting in the normal sense, be sure to uncheck "Change system breaks".)