Category Archives: Files

How can I turn my sheet music into a book?

You can do this, but there are at least three distinct methods.  Each has different compromises.

The destination: single PDF

For the purposes of this exercise, we want to finish with a single PDF document, storing the entire book. This is what you want almost all the time, including:

  • Printing yourself, with the printer on your desk
  • Sending files to other people to download and print
  • Taking to your local print shop
  • Selling via print-on-demand

PDF may not not be sufficient if:

  • You want to share work other people can edit – for this, provide your original notation file and also export to MusicXML
  • You want to distribute your music with interactive playback or video – tools exist for this, but are too complex to discuss here
  • You are working for a major publisher – in this case, they should provide specific file and formatting guidelines

So, how do we go from notation to a single PDF?

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What are vector graphics? When should I use them?

Vector graphics are images defined by shape coordinates, instead of the more common method of defining them by pixels.

You should use vector graphics whenever a vector file exists and the application you use can read it. Neither circumstance is as common as it should be.

Describing pictures

Below is a picture. Take a moment to think about how you would describe it.

Black arrow pointing to the right, looking sharp on most screens.

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How do I make my PDF files smaller?

By compressing the pictures. Depending on the tools available you may apply this compression (1) to your existing PDF, (2) while generating your PDF, (3) to your source document, or (4) to your individual pictures.

Every technique described here will make the pictures in your document fuzzier and less distinct. Never overwrite the original print-quality document with a compressed version. Before sharing a compressed PDF, open it and take a close look to make sure it’s still meaningful.

How large might my PDF be?

A good assumption is that your PDF will be at least as large as the sum of the pictures that go into it.  This isn’t always true – some PDF generators insist on applying some compression (making the file smaller than estimated), while some edits may turn JPEG-compressed pictures into PNG or TIFF (dramatically increasing the file size).  Still, it’s a start.

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Why will the music CD I play on my computer but not in my CD player?

Most likely because it is a data CD containing audio files, not a music CD containing audio tracks.

Check the basics first

It is also possible that your computer isn’t burning CDs properly.  See Why does the music CD I burnt on my computer skip when I play it?

If you are sure the CD does indeed work in computers, it is probably a formatting problem.

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Why can other computers write to this memory stick, but mine can’t?

Because the memory stick is not formatted for your computer’s native filesystem.

Assigning meaning to the numbers that assign meaning to other numbers

Back in What is a file extension? Why does it matter?, we learnt the importance of file names and file extensions.  However, even file and directory names are stored as a sequence of numbers.  The filesystem is a set of rules about how to turn that sequence into folders and files.

It would be nice if all computers used the same filesystem.  As usual, they don’t.

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Why does the music CD I burnt on my computer skip when I play it?

Because it has some burn errors.

Keep the plates spinning

One of the few consistent virtues of computers is patience.  They may rudely insist that we answer “OK” or “Cancel” to some inane question we don’t understand, but they don’t complain if we wait hours before answering.

Burning a disc is a rare exception.  It is a physical process, with the disc being spinning at up to 4,800 revolutions per minute ((Wikipedia entry on CD-ROM Transfer rates)).  Then the drive must write retrieve the information to burn just as it needs it – up to 900 megabytes worth.  There are two ways that this can go wrong: (1) physically shaking the disc as it spins, or (2) interrupting the data transfer.

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What is a file extension? Why does it matter?

It’s part of the filename that tells your computer what the file (probably) contains.

Assigning meaning to numbers

When you save a document, it is stored as a long list of numbers.  You may have heard that “computers can only count ones and zeroes”, and at the lowest level, this is correct.  We can represent those numbers any way we like; here are document contents represented as base 16 (hexadecimal).

D0 CF 11 E0 A1 B1 1A E1 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

This still isn’t useful.  We want to open the document in an application that displays those numbers in a way that is meaningful to us.  Does anything here tell us which application to use?

Something does, in fact: the name of the file is “Words.xls”.  “Words” is the name I gave it, but the “xls” tells us that it’s a Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet.

Why do I need to know this?

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Why do programmers format dates using YYYY-MM-DD?

Because a dictionary sort puts them into the correct order.

Naming documents

We often create multiple documents with the same purpose but for different times.

  • Newsletter 29th October 2010
  • Newsletter 5th February 2011
  • Newsletter 15th April 2011
  • Newsletter 1st July 2011

It is usually good to give such documents a name that includes the date.

Dictionary sorting: the problem

However, when we look at the list of documents, something terrible happens.  On older computers, they will usually be ordered like this:

  • Newsletter 15th April 2011
  • Newsletter 1st July 2011
  • Newsletter 29th October 2010
  • Newsletter 5th February 2011

What went wrong?

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