Central Market

Urp oh God I'm suddenly feeling really nauseous. I think it was that applesauce I just had. Urgh... I don't wanna barf with my bands still on my braces, that would be gnarly. Be strong Kelly, be strong...

So back when I used a PC, I was in the habit of collecting midi files. I'm out of the habit now, but I still value midis a lot higher than other music formats, and I began to wonder why. I also recently decided to sign into my Deviant Art account for the first time in forever (50k+ deviations and 42 messages were waiting for me), and took a glance over my old submissions. I looked at what my desktop used to be, and saw the lovable ol' application NoteWorthy Composer.

NoteWorthy is great. It lets me import midi files and translate them into readable sheet music, which I can then fiddle with all I want. I can also compose my own music on it, but who wants to do that? Once I'm finished fiddling, I can print out the music and actually play it. A vast majority of songs I was trying to learn came from doing this. So I was collecting midis in the same way one might collect books of music. And since you couldn't import MP3 files or anything else, midis were simply the best.

I stumbled across two midi files for You Were There, that Ico song. I remember searching long and hard for sheet music for that song, and could only find it written for strange outlandish instruments. It's such a pretty song, and it doesn't sound very difficult, so there was no way I was going to let this one go. So when I found those files? I was all FUCKING RIGHT JACKPOT.

But then I realized that NoteWorthyComposer doesn't work on a Mac, and I was all

FFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUU

And GarageBand is crap, I don't care what anyone has to say. It's like MS Paint, but bloated and handy-capped. There was no way I could make it do what I wanted.

I spent some time searching for programs that might work on my Mac and do the same thing as NWC. Apparantly, this is a big problem for Mac users that are also musicians (I doubt there are that many of us, so it's not like this program is in huge demand). The two suggestions were Aeria Maestosa and Finale Notepad. Aeria started out really promising. I imported the Midi file, and figured out how to get it to display the music as sheet music, and not it's funky line and bars system. I was all happy until I realized it could not print. MOTHERFUCKER HOW USELESS. Fine then, I'll just use Finale Notepad. This is why I download things. But Finale doesn't have the option to import midi files. ALWIRGTIHNABEOTH--Wait. It does have the ability to print music, and it displays things on the screen in a very easy to understand manner. I know! I'll just use Aeria to translate the music into something I can read, and then stick the notes one by one into Finale. It'll take time, but I'll get my music in the end, right?

Right?

FUCKING WRONG. I spent an hour and a half just trying to put in the simple melody. First, I couldn't figure out how to do rest notes. I was bravely soldiering on without it until I realized that I needed fucking rest notes, and had to spend all this time yelling at the program to display the correct toolbar. Then I thought that maybe learning the keyboard shortcuts would help things move along. But SURPRISE, the keyboard shortcuts are traps. It says press five to switch to the quater-note tool, but really all it does is cause notes to stack up on top of the most recent one you placed, creating a veritable tower of shit. Same with the number 6, which is supposed to give you half-notes, not tower-notes.

I needed to slur two notes, but the slur tool wasn't working. I consulted the help menu (AGAIN) to find that I needed to double-click and drag to make it work. Double-click and drag? I've never actually had to do that before, in my life. Especially since double-tapping is how I click-and drag on this laptop, so that means triple tap, or what? And once I finally got the slur in there, the program didn't recognize it as a slur, and ignored it all together. Because I used the wrong slur tool. WHY ARE THERE TWO SLUR TOOLS?!

And why is one of them fake?!

After fighting with the program to remove needless punctuation, add more pages, play the music at an audible level, have a time signature, keep in key, stop bending the space-time continuum, add the correct notes where I put them, and just overall work, I got the first page done, saved it, and started hitting things with a baseball bat. There has got to be a better way. One that doesn't involve me turning on my PC, because I am planning to wipe it and sell it (or donate it to a friend) soon. And I want to still be able to play music after my PC is gone.

... I just wanna play music.