Copyist

By Ian Waugh


Dr T produced a plethora of music programs in the early days of the ST including a range of scorewriters under the Copyist banner.  They came with varying numbers of features and were called Copyist Copyist Apprentice and Copyist DTP.
The range has now been re-aligned and the DTP version emerged as the sole survivor at a greatly reduced price. In its heyday it had an RRP of 249 and the new 69 price tag makes it a very attractive proposition, so we thought it worth seeing how it would suit the scorewriter of today.
There is some setting up to do before you start. You must run a configuration program to select the printer type and the work and program directories. If you're running Copyist within Dr T's custom Multi-Program Environment you have to allocate memory to it.
Although a hard disk is not be strictly necessary, it will be of great benefit as the program needs a disk for temporary work files and program modules which are loaded when required. If you have enough memory, a good option is to use a RAM disk which will speed up many operations.
The program, as its name says, is indeed a music DTP program. You start with a blank sheet of paper - the screen - and you can place lust about anything anywhere on it. First you place some staves, add the clefs, key and time signatures, then the notes followed by music symbols and lyrics if required.

SELECTED

It's fine in theory but a little involved in practice. Many symbols can be selected from menus with the mouse but to enter some you have to press up to three keys. This in itself wouldn't be so bad but if you're in the middle of a three keystroke sequence, the program doesn't tell you which key you've just pressed.
If you keep your wits you won't have many problems, but if you half press or miss press a key or if you can't remember if you're one or two keystrokes into the command (come on, it's easily done) you won't get the required results and you may have to highlight an incorrect entry or symbol and delete it. All of which is annoying and frustrating and not conducive to good working practices.
The program adheres to its multi-keystroke approach throughout all aspects of operation. For example, to move back a page you press pp (previous page) and to move forward a page you press pn (page next). A keyboard overlay is supplied with most of the major keystrokes on it and this is a good aid. There are eight pages of help available on-line which is useful, too.
But let's get back to the score. You can enter notes at or around a cursor position in two ways. You can select note heads from a menu and then beam them if necessary which is rather slow.

POSITIONS

Alternately, you can use the keys on the Qwerty keyboard which place notes at various positions above and below the cursor. This is a little more complex as you have to remember how far above and below the cursor each key places its note.
As I've already said (but it bears repeating) Copyist lets you place anything anywhere. While groups of symbols can be cut, copied and moved, once bars have been laid down you can't insert another bar and push the following bars down the score so you have to be careful when planning the layout.
Copyist can load and save Standard Midi files. The transcription process involves two stages - the creation of a temporary Stream file and then the conversion of this into a Copyist notation file.
Before making the Stream file, the program asks you questions about the file such as the time signature and the clefs you want the tracks converted to. Before converting the stream file into notation it asks lots more questions about whether or not to include rests, page numbers, stems, bar lines and so on. And then it does its stuff. It ain't fast. A 12-page score can take several minutes to produce. The program can handle scores up to 100 pages long so if you're in an orchestral frame of mind make sure the coffee's on and the pot's big. And get a hold of War And Peace. Converting a score to a Midi file can take a while, too.
The program doesn't attempt to make any decisions for itself and you really need to prepare the score well before transcribing it otherwise you may have an awful lot of editing to do in the program.
Copyist is replete with features. It supports percussion 'staves and allows you to extract individual parts from a score. Music symbols include ties, octave and ending marks, arpeggios, trills, crescendos and slurs. You can use normal, bold, italic, compressed and double-width typefaces. The package includes a font editor which lets you design your own symbols. One of the demo files contains examples of guitar chord symbols.

AUTOMATIC

You can record macros which will automate operations requiring lots of keystrokes. These might be useful to simplify some of the more obscure or complex functions.
Macros can be made to wait for input from the user and they can call other macros - heavy stuff! You could use them to create composite symbols, an oft-repeated phrase and so on.
Copyist can save files in TIFF or EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) formats for loading into DTP programs proper. This might appeal to something thinking about producing their own music book, schools perhaps, but educational users would do well to take the complexity of the program into consideration, too.
Copyist supports a wide range of printers including Epson-compatible dot matrixes, HP Laseriets, the IBM Proprinter, Atari's laser printer and PostScript printers. The PostScript option lets you specify the number of copies you want to print and scale the output
There is absolutely no doubt at all that the results can be extremely impressive indeed. You only need to look at some of the demo scores so see this. The total flexibility of being able to place anything anywhere may be welcomed by many.
However, I suspect the majority of potential scorewriter users would prefer the computer to make most of the decisions about where to place symbols, notes, bar lines and so on, and to adjust the spacing automatically. There are strict music typesetting rules governing these things and the program should be able to implement them.

SENSIBLE

Do users really want to be asked so many questions when they import a Midi file or would they prefer the program to make sensible decisions about clefs and quantisation based on the pitch range and contents of the file?. After all, that's what computers are supposed to be good for.
Copyist DTP was last updated in 1991 and although Dr T is developing new programs, it looks as though this one is a bit of a sell-off. But that's fine. You get a good deal on the software as long as you realise than updates are extremely unlikely to appear.
However, the lack of updates has meant that the program  is  not conversant with the latest types of Standard Midi files and it refused to convert some files which otherwise loaded perfectly happily into several ST sequencers.
And I have to report that the program locked up and bombed out a few times, too.
The manual is fair but could do with more illustrations and better tutorials. You'll need to read it carefully. One part of the tutorial which doesn't particularly inspire confidence is a printed example in which the notes are wrongly positioned.
The time signature is 4/4 and eight quavers are shown occupying the first half of a bar, not spread evenly across it as they should be. They are all beamed together, too, which is an unlikely occurrence although not impossible. The next two bars contain whole notes which should be positioned at the left of the bars but instead they are in the middle. OK, it's just an example, but if the programmer's don't know how music is supposed to look...
Existing users of Dr T programs such as KCS who are used to his ways will probably enjoy the option of a low-cost, multi-featured scoring program. For the rest, however, weigh up the features against the interface and ask how much your time is worth.


FEATURES

Features and support for virtually every type ST printer.

EASE OF USE

The user interface is archaic and, at times, positively hostile.

VALUE FOR MONEY
You won't get more features for less money.

Atari ST User April 1994
