A new downloadble plugin, Dot Undot Rhythms, is available for free download at http://www.sibelius.com/download/plugins/index.html?plugin=536, in category Notes and Rests.
Given a passage selection, the plugin determines that certain adjacent notes are pairs. If the pairs have the same duration, the plugin will dot the first note and divide the duration of the second note in half. If the notes are a dotted pair, it will make the notes the same duration, thus undotting the pair.
(EDIT: this is no longer true)
IMPORTANT: This plugins calls the downloadable Divide Durations plugin (category Notes and Rests), so you must also install Divide Durations, version 01.60.00 or later to use this plugin.
There are some restrictions. Do not run the plugin if your selection contains cross staff beamed notes, because the plugin cannot detect them and if they are changed the notes will lose their cross staff beamed property. (The same limitation is true for Divide Durations. A plugin can neither detect nor create cross staff beamed notes).
The plugin processes a bar at a time and it will skip any bars that contain tuplets, grace notes, quartertones or double tremolos.
There is no dialog. Just make a selection and run the plugin.
This plugin was inspired by, and is dedicated to, Daniel Spreadbury
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Ok, so you might think, oh Bob has written yet another obscure plugin. Look again. Check out the screenshot.
I saw an amazing demo from Daniel Spreadbury for his new notation program from Steinberg. (Daniel, as many know, was the long-time Sibelius program manager who was fired in 2012 along with the entire Sibelius development team. Steinberg hired the entire team to write a new notation product).
You can see the demo following Chris' link on this thread:
http://www.sibelius.com/cgi-bin/helpcenter/chat/chat.pl?com=thread&start=694212&groupid=3&words=steinberg&name=
The demo showed him selecting a bunch of notes and hitting the dot key, and all the selected 8th notes were transformed to dotted 8th/16th pairs. I watched this in disbelief.
Doing such a transformation in Sibelius is a royal pain.
I had previously considered writing a plugin to make it easier to make dotted rhythms but it would be very hard to write, and I figured you would have to select the pair of notes to change and it would not be all that much better than doing what you had to do by hand to make a dotted pair (turn the 2nd note into half its duration, type R, dot the first note). But here he was just selecting a bunch of notes and hitting one key, and boom everything was dotted.
For a notation geek, this sort of thing is stunning.
So I figured that if he can do that, there must be a way that it can be done, so I set out to see how to do that. I discovered a way to determine if a given note was a possible first note for a dotted pair, and then everything became possible, sort of. ManuScript, the plugin language, has no mechanism for changing the duration of a note. You have to rather intricately gather properties of both the chord and all its notes, then delete the original notes and add in new ones. I realized that my Divide Durations plugin did something like that, and I was able to tweak it a bit so it would do what I needed it to do.
(EDIT: this is no longer true)
It is important to note that you will need to install the current version of Divide Durations as well (http://www.sibelius.com/download/plugins/index.html?plugin=300, category Notes and Rests) to run Dot Undot Rhythms. Divide Durations is also a cool plugin so you will not regret installing it.
Dot Undot Rhythms looks at the selected notes and figures out which notes could be the first note of a dotted pair. If the following note has the right duration it will dot the first and halve the second, or vice versa. It toggles the state of the notes. Try assigning a shortcut to Dot Undot Rhythms, selecting a bunch of notes and hitting the shortcut over and over.
Tell me this is not poetry. Tell me you could do the same thing in Lilypond with 4 obscure lines of code. I don't care. This is a beautiful thing. Consider doing this by hand.
Yeah, it won't deal with quartertones or gracenotes or tuplets (which it could do but I am not putting in the work to do it). The turtle is flying but it is not all that graceful. Hit the shortcut a few more times. Pretty fine flying, Mr. Turtle.
I asked Daniel for permission to publish this plugin, since it was totally his idea. As was the Bravura font that Finale and Musescore now use, and which we in Sibelius can access through Philip Rothman's Norfolk fonts. He agreed that once he makes an idea public it is fair game and he would not hate me if I published it. So here it is.
Go ahead and select a bunch of notes in a passage (box) selection and let it rip. Within its limitations it is a thing of beauty.
And oh, yeah, you should check out Daniel's Making Notes blog (http://blog.steinberg.net/) that discusses the new Steinberg project. It will be incredible. This plugin is dedicated to Daniel. Great idea, Daniel! Thanks!
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Bob
An experienced user of Sibelius. Sib 1.2 - 8, Windows 7 Pro SP 1 64 bit, 8 G RAM. Year 2016. |
DotUndot Example 2.png