Allegroassai Opus 2.6 Review

May 1, 2001 12:00 PM, By Brian Smithers

Allegroassai (formerly Sincrosoft) is making a play for the hearts and minds of well-connected 21st-century musicians. The Italian software company has recently developed an integrated system of notation software and Web-based music publishing and is actively creating its own online community for musicians. At the center of this system is an ever-growing collection of downloadable scores and a family of programs that let users view, print, personalize, and edit those scores. (For more information on the company's approach to online music publishing, see the sidebar “Scores Online.”) For this review, I'll focus on Opus 2.6, Allegroassai's flagship notation program, but other “lite” versions of the software are also available (see the sidebar “The Opus Family”).

SCORING BIG

Opus 2.6 is a full-feature program able to hold its own in many respects with the biggest names in the notation-software arena. It allows an unlimited number of staves in a score and supports pages of any size. You can have as many as eight voices per staff, choose from six time signature formats (see Fig. 1), draw tuplets ten different ways, and have 30 documents open simultaneously.

If you are not pleased with the program's automatic spacing, you can always drag any element of an Opus score to a different position. You can create multiple lines of lyrics and incorporate different text fonts. You can also customize the default spacing of many elements, from ties to dots to accidentals.

The Toolbar features eight icons that provide one-click access to functions in the Edit, Notes, Score, and Tools menus. You can customize the Toolbar as well, and ensure that your most-used functions are always at your fingertips. To get you started quickly, Opus provides a number of score templates for common types of ensembles.

Opus was originally written for the Macintosh, but it has been available for Windows since version 2.0. Its Mac heritage shows up in little ways: the program has no right-click functions, no pop-up tool tips, and no F1 Help. In addition, the Windows version seems a bit less finished in a few places in the user interface and documentation. My primary test platform was a Windows 98 machine, but I also took Opus for a spin on a Mac G4 and found that the two versions are essentially the same in appearance and function. You can share files between platforms, but you must export your score to the other platform's file format first.

DA CAPO

Installing Opus is easy and straightforward with the refreshingly simple antipiracy process of entering a serial number and password from the back of the manual. The installation asks you to choose among five languages: French, Italian, German, English, and Spanish. The Mac installation looks for Opcode's Open Music System (OMS) and installs it if necessary.

When you create a new document, a three-tab dialog box lets you specify the page size and margins, and it lets you choose the number and type of staves along with their sizes, spacing, and names. These are not, however, “intelligent” instrument assignments that understand customary clefs and transpositions; they're merely staves with names.

To set up a transposed score, therefore, you must assign an appropriate key signature to each transposing instrument's staff and then set a transpose value elsewhere in the program to ensure proper MIDI playback. If you then copy something to a staff with a different transposition, the notes are copied as written, not sounded, which requires you to transpose them manually. If one part changes instruments, say from oboe to English horn or flute to alto flute, you have to sacrifice proper appearance or proper sound. This is a frustrating set of shortcomings to someone who writes for a lot of woodwind doublers.

Moreover, Opus only lets you choose European page sizes. You'll find everything from A0 to B5, but you won't find U.S. letter or legal sizes. American users are left to specify those page sizes as custom settings. This minor annoyance is made worse by the fact that the hard-copy manual doesn't say what the units of those custom settings are. The Help file cites a conversion of 1,420 units per inch; Allegroassai claims the actual number is approximately 1,512 units per inch. A letter-size page is therefore 16,641 by 12,859. Margins are measured in the same way.

One other point should be kept in mind while you're in the New Document dialog box: once you choose the order of staves, you can't change it. You can change your mind about almost anything else in Opus, but if you decide at a later time to bring a solo trumpet part to the top of the score, for example, you're out of luck.

To ensure proper playback of your score, you must set up the proper program changes in the MIDI Mixer window. The Mixer controls the channel assignments, pan, and part volume, along with Solo, Mute, and Record status. Several patch maps are conveniently provided; among them are General MIDI, E-mu Proteus 1 and 2, and Korg M1. You can also create as many as three custom patch maps for your own devices. Intelligent MIDI playback of dynamic markings is supported as well.

The playback tempo and your score's notated tempo are the same, although you can hide the “real” tempo and enter a display-only tempo as a text marking. Through the Tempo Options dialog box, Opus also lets you assign a metronome reference click that is different than the time signature's denominator. This is a great way to get around the problem of translating a fast 6/8 tempo into a more practical dotted-quarter-note pulse. You can even assign a tuplet value as your metronome pulse.

NOTEWORTHY POINTS

Opus lets you enter notes in any of four ways: mouse-clicking, real-time MIDI recording, step-time MIDI input, and importing Standard MIDI Files. Mouse entry is by far the simplest and most direct way to enter notes and markings, but it is also the least efficient. Nonetheless, in any notation program I find myself relying on mouse entry at least part of the time.

The program also provides a healthy assortment of palettes from which to choose notes, rests, symbols, and markings (see Fig. 2). For a novice, this makes data entry a simple matter of selecting an item and placing it on the page with a click. To speed things along, Opus lets you select a note's duration with your computer keyboard's number keys. In fact, when you select a rhythmic value in this way, Opus thoughtfully sets the mouse pointer to the Pencil tool, so you're ready to enter notes. You can also turn any note into a rest by pressing the R key on your keyboard.

This keyboard and mouse synergy is one of my favorite aspects of Opus, because it saves me from having to go back to the Note palette to select a new rhythmic value. It would be even better if you could add a sharp, flat, natural, or dot to a note as you enter it. Unfortunately, to make a dotted note you must enter the note without the dot, choose the dot from the Note palette, and click on the note head. Accidentals have mnemonic hotkeys but must also be added by clicking on a note after the note has been entered. This breaks the flow of what would otherwise be an efficient method of note entry.

MIDI ME

Real-time MIDI recording in Opus is simple and effective, but the setup procedure is a bit quirky. In the Record Setup dialog box (see Fig. 3), you can select the MIDI input device, provided you know to click on the device's name. The documentation instructs you to click on the Receive Input on Port box, but no such box exists in the Windows version.

Next you must record-enable a staff from the Mixer window. There again Opus clearly favors simplicity over efficiency, because enabling a different track requires another trip through the Mixer. If the Mixer window had a hotkey (or could be minimized or resized in the Windows version), the annoyance factor would be considerably reduced.

Last, you must set a recording start and end time in the Audio (transport) window. This lets you set precise punch-in and punch-out points, but it means that you can't just click on the bar where you want to start recording as you generally can in other programs.

Step-recording with MIDI input shares good and bad points with mouse entry. Selecting notes from the MIDI keyboard with one hand while you select durations from the computer keyboard with your other hand is a recipe for speedy copying, but the dotted-note problem is even worse here because Opus won't advance to the next bar until the current bar is rhythmically full.

Opus does a respectable job of importing MIDI files and provides control over quantization, tuplets, and voice splitting. After you import the file, you'll probably want to set a key signature for the score, and this can require much reworking of accidentals. The Notes menu has tools to expedite the process, but it still demands a good deal of manual effort.

ESPRESSIVO

Entering dynamics, articulations, fingerings, and other expressive markings from a collection of palettes is a tried-and-true system, and Opus offers a range of markings covering most classical-music situations. Bowings, fingerings, mallets, mordents, rolls, repeats, harmonics, and harp pedalings are easily entered. However, jazz markings such as bends and falls are conspicuously absent, and there is no provision for importing custom symbols or for creating them from scratch.

The Text palette enables you to enter expressive instructions, guitar chord symbols, tempo markings, and lyrics. This is a straightforward procedure once you guess that you must double-click on one of the palette's buttons to open a dialog box (in the Windows version) — a minor but frustrating omission from the written manual that is corrected in the Help file.

The Text, Lyric, and Frets (guitar chord) dialog boxes employ a similar approach. They first ask you to enter the desired text or choose the appropriate chord. When you close the dialog box by clicking OK, the cursor turns to a crosshair with which you place the marking into the score. You can apply the same lyric, text marking, or chord symbol repeatedly without retyping it, because the crosshair remains “loaded” until you select another tool. In fact, Opus remembers the last text entered, so if you want to use it again, you can simply click once on the Text button, and the crosshair is armed and ready to go. The Frets and Text dialog boxes are somehow intertwined, though, and I sometimes got strange results, such as a text marking showing up in the OpusFrets font.

The procedure for entering text clearly shows the program's preference for simplicity over power, a good or bad thing depending on your perspective. Each time you want to enter a text marking, you have to type it into the dialog box, rather than select it from a user-definable list of often-used words. Instead of editing lyrics, chord symbols, or text, you simply delete the original marking and create a new one from scratch. Fortunately, you can delete individual syllables of lyrics and replace them, saving you the nightmare of replacing an entire verse because of a single typo.

Jazz and commercial musicians will find the Frets function inadequate for the lead-sheet chord notation common in those genres. You can't display the chord name without the fretboard fingering display, so chord changes end up looking like commercial sheet music instead of professional lead sheets. Getting the traditional look requires entering chord symbols as regular text markings, and if you need chord slashes, you must enter them free-form from one of the Symbol palettes.

SPACING: THE FINAL FRONTIER

Written music is an extremely complex language, and designing appropriate rules of spacing and layout is the biggest challenge in writing notation software. Opus has an easy-to-read appearance in its default spacing onscreen and in print, but the program sometimes lets elements overlap when they shouldn't (see Fig. 4). The fact that you can drag any symbol to a better location mitigates the problem considerably, but a serious notation program shouldn't let symbols collide under most conditions.

It would also be nice if Opus recognized more related items. For example, I moved the notes of a triplet down a line, and the beam and slur didn't move with them. Articulations move with notes, but you must drag beams and slurs manually.

Opus offers flexible control over the beaming of notes, and the two pertinent dialog boxes provide helpful graphic examples of the alternatives. You can specify the default position, length, or width of stems, ties, beams, dots, and other elements for a custom appearance. Four alternative note heads are provided, and any symbol from any installed font can be used as a note head. Complex slurs can be created by dragging the four handles of a slur, and slurs and hairpins automatically continue onto the next line, a very handy feature.

Although a wide range of zoom settings is available, the program lacks scroll and two-page views, as well as a true print preview. The only available view is a sort of page view on a white background, with the edges of the page represented by a red line if you choose to show margins.

PARTS DEPARTMENT

The behavior of Opus's part-extraction function was at times unpredictable; I found it difficult to know which score markings would carry over into the extracted parts. On the positive side, Opus lets you mark certain instructions, such as tempo, dynamics, and text-based repeats on a score's top staff and then specify which markings are to be included in the extracted parts. The Text dialog box offers the option of attaching your tempo marking to the page, to the selected staff, or to all staves. When I attached my marking to all staves, each extracted part properly specified the tempo.

Unfortunately, other markings don't offer the same choices. For example, I entered a D.S. al Coda instruction through the Score menu, and it would only display correctly in the extracted parts if the measure in which it had been placed wasn't part of a multimeasure (consolidated) rest. The Segno and Coda markings to which the instruction referred are on one of the Symbol palettes, and they didn't appear in the parts unless I placed them individually in each staff of the score. Even then I couldn't count on them appearing in the right spot in the extracted part if they fell within a multimeasure rest.

To extract individual parts from a score, simply choose Extract Parts from the Tools menu and select what you want to extract from a list of all the staves. If you select all the staves for extraction, though, you end up with a copy of the score. The dialog box isn't asking which individual parts you want to end up with, it's asking which staves you want included in the single part you're extracting. This makes it easy to generate parts such as Violins 1 and 2 or a combined percussion part with multiple staves, but for every part you want to extract, you must go through the dialog box process manually. A 15-staff score requires dozens of mouse clicks, not to mention typing a file name for each part.

AL FINE

Several little things give Opus an unnecessarily cumbersome feel. For instance, no keystroke is provided to move from page to page within a score; you must use the Go to Page dialog box or the Page pull-down menu on the toolbar. In general, the user interface relies too heavily on multiple-tab dialog boxes that force you to page through small groups of parameters to find a particular setting. Larger dialog boxes with all the parameters visible at once would greatly streamline the program.

Although you can drag notes and accidentals wherever you want, editing slurs and some other markings requires displaying their Control Points using the Tools menu. That would be fine, except you have to select each marking type (slurs, ties, tuplet brackets, and so on) separately from a pull-down menu. The Control Points are shown for only one type of mark at a time. When you delete one of the related items in the score, all remaining Control Points disappear, forcing you to select them again from the menu. Drag-copying and drag-moving are not supported except for moving individual notes, and Opus only offers a single level Undo command.

In spite of a relatively simple and straightforward user interface, some common tasks are surprisingly convoluted in Opus. To add a pick-up note to the beginning of a 6/8 score, for example, you must start with a bar of 1/8, then insert a 6/8 time signature for the rest of the piece. Next you must hide both time signatures and use the Text tool to enter a 6 over an 8 at the beginning of the first bar. (This information isn't provided in the manual or the Help file.)

I look forward to better things from Opus in future releases. Allegroassai has already solved the hardest problem: getting good output without a steep learning curve. If the company brings the program's interface up to the level of its notation capabilities and adds a few more features, Opus might become a serious contender in the notation-software realm, especially considering Allegroassai's strong commitment to Internet music publishing.

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Brian Smithers is associate course director of MIDI at Full Sail Real World Education in Winter Park, Florida. You can reach him through his Web site members.aol.com/notebooks1.

Minimum System Requirements

Opus

PC: Pentium processor or equivalent; Windows 95/98/NT/2000; 16 MB RAM (32 MB recommended)

MAC: 68040 processor (PPC recommended); Mac OS 7 or higher; 8 MB RAM (16 MB recommended)

SCORES ONLINE

Allegroassai has leveraged its experience in developing notation software into a push to become a major online music publisher. The company has more than 1,700 titles for sale in its Opus file format, and you can purchase and download the scores even if you don't own Opus 2.6.

A display-only version of the software, Opus Viewer, is available as a free download; it lets you view and print the scores that you purchase. Two reduced-feature versions of Opus are also available at a modest cost, so you can customize your scores (see the sidebar “The Opus Family”). These programs let you perform such tasks as transposing the score, changing articulations, and adding fingerings.

So far Allegroassai's catalog consists mainly of standards from the romantic, classical, and baroque periods, which are in the public domain. Certainly thousands of pieces from these periods are worthy of study and performance, but one has to hope that eventually Allegroassai will also offer newer works.

At the Allegroassai Web site, you can browse the catalog or search for specific titles. When you find something of interest, you can obtain additional information and then decide whether to purchase the music. Allegroassai has made first-page previews available for most of its titles to help you locate and identify a particular composition.

According to the company, each score undergoes at least four quality-control steps to ensure that the online scores are equal to or better than most published hard-copy scores. In addition, particular attention is paid to the layout of the scores so that they fit various printer formats, including U.S. letter size.

Online music publishing has great potential because it lets you edit and customize parts and scores and keeps the cost low through nonphysical distribution. Allegroassai has made the process simple while providing for high-quality results.

THE OPUS FAMILY

For the musician who doesn't need industrial-strength notation software or for someone seeking an inexpensive way to view, edit, or annotate downloaded Opus scores, Allegroassai has some little “opi” from which to choose. Amadeus Opus Lite ($89) is the company's entry-level notation program. It has the same interface as Opus but a reduced feature set. It lets users create scores with as many as 16 staves yet still permits eight voices per staff. Amadeus features the same note-entry techniques as Opus, except that it won't accept tuplets when importing a MIDI file.

Amadeus can open only two documents at once; supports only a five-line staff or percussion staff; has fewer zoom options; and can hide only rests, not note heads, stems, or tuplets. It won't insert quarter-tone accidentals, but it will display them in a score prepared using Opus. Its palettes are otherwise nearly identical to those in Opus. Amadeus won't do tweaky little things such as display stems on rests or extend beams to the next rest, but in the features that count the most — note entry, spacing, layout, and output quality — it's virtually identical to Opus. Although it shares the same shortcomings, those shortcomings are much easier to forgive at less than $90 than they are at nearly $300.

Purchasers of Allegroassai's downloadable scores can save even more money by getting Opus Editor ($19.95). This extremely stripped-down version of Opus can edit articulations, add notes, and play and print downloaded scores. It cannot create new documents, but it can open scores created in Opus or Amadeus. Only mouse entry of notes and symbols is supported, but Opus Editor does let users transpose scores.

Finally, Allegroassai offers the free Opus Viewer for viewing, printing, and MIDI playback of downloaded scores. Its features include changing MIDI instrument assignments and allowing as many documents to be open simultaneously as users want. The system requirements for Amadeus, Opus Editor, and Opus Viewer are the same as for Opus.

PRODUCT SUMMARY

Allegroassai