Detailed Examples
This example sets up a Treble - Tab pair so entering music in one line automatically enters appropriate music into the other line ("mutual translation"):
1) Position the caret at the place where you want the Treble-Tab pair
to be inserted, then click on the "Insert Line Group" button (or hit
Ctrl+Shift+G).
(This Treble-Tab pair is a small "line group").
2) The "Line Group" dialog will appear with Treble, Tab, and Text lines pre-selected. Modify the settings as shown to set up a Treble-Tab "mutually translating" pair:
3) The pair will now appear in the document. Entering notes in
the top line will automatically enter Tab fingering into the bottom line,
-or- entering tab fingering in the bottom line will enter notes at the
proper location in the top line. See pg. 60 in the manual to learn
how to set note values (eg. quarter or half notes) in a Tab line so that
the translated notes in the treble line will have the proper values.
Mutual translation can be set up among several different line types,
and more than two lines can be mutually translating at the same time.
See your MusEdit manual (pg. 83-89 for more details)
To create a margin on the left edge of music which will be visible on the screen (to shift all the music to the right a little) place the caret in the top line (any line is OK, but it's easier to use the top line), then select View|Label Selected Line(s) (or hit Ctrl+L). This will present a small dialog in which you can enter a number of spaces (up to 31). You are giving the line a label consisting solely of spaces, but all lines will be shifted right to make room for this "fake" label -giving the effect of a left margin on the screen. You will not be able to enter text (other than line labels), symbols, or anything else in this gap however.
If the spacing isn't right go back to the top line and hit Ctrl+L
again, then adjust the number of spaces. (This is mentioned briefly
on pg. 21 of the manual).
1) Run MusEdit and create the chords, lyrics, and music lines you'd like, and have them show fully in a MusEdit window. It may help to hide all the toobars and maximize the window to get maximum area for the music.
2) Hit Alt+PrintScrn (a button up near Scroll Lock, NumLock keys). This captures an image of the MusEdit window onto the clipboard.
3) Open Paint (the primitive Windows-supplied paint program). (Go to the Start Menu, click on Programs|Accessories|Paint.
4) Do Edit|Paste ( or Ctrl+V ) to paste the snapshot of the MusEdit window into Paint. Answer YES when it asks if you want the bitmap enlarged (the window will probably be much bigger than the starting rectangle Paint gives you at first).
5) You should now have a big bitmap of the MusEdit window, with your
chord diagrams, tab, etc. visible. Click once on the "Pencil" icon
on Paint's toolbar: 
(this
is to "lock" the newly pasted image in place, otherwise it might disappear
-a goofy quirk of Paint), then click the selection rectangle tool:
.
6) Select the chord diagrams/tab that you want, do Edit|Copy (Ctrl+C), then File|New (Ctrl+N). Paint asks: "Do you want to save changes" -click "No" (you don't want to save the image of the window, which includes the frame, etc.)
7) You should now have another blank rectangle to work with. Paste your new selection (Ctrl+V). You can now clean up the bitmap and arrange things as you'd like... One more thing you may want to do it choose Image|Attributes (Ctrl+E) and select "Black and White" since monochrome bitmaps can take 80% less space (especially important for web pages). Save your image as something meaningful in an appropriate directory. You may want to convert it to a .gif file to take up less disk space (see next point).
8) a) If you want to embed this music snapshot in a web page, you should definitely convert the .bmp (bitmap) file to a .gif file! NOTE: Black and white music compresses smaller and more cleanly as a .gif file than as a JPEG, which is the usual compression used for web pages (you will need some kind of image converter software for converting bitmaps to gifs -anyone with suggestions I can recommend in this space, please e-mail Yowza Software). To create a link to the music, put the following html line in your html document:
<A HREF="MyMusic.gif">Link to my music image</A>
Where:
"mymusic" is the name of the gif file in this case
"Link to my music image" is the link text
This will appear as: Link to my music image
8) b) If you want to paste your music into a word processor, such as Word97 you can insert that image you've prepared. I don't know the details of Word specificallly, but usually there's a menu item called Insert|Picture... or something like that. Activate this, then choose the "Select File" option, choose the image file you preparted earlier, and it will get inserted into your document. Be careful how your word processor handles issues such as "warp around" (how text fills in around the picture) and positioning. It can take a little experience to get those word-processor details right. You may be able to paste images directly into Word instead of via an external file, but I think it's better to use external files (you can get the image again whenever you need it, for example).
One point: Tab works nicely this way because it's mostly numbers and clean little bitmaps, but tied notes (or tab with note stems showing) look a bit ugly because the beams are jagged due to the poor screen resolution (you see this throughout the manual).
If you really need high quality you can print the music out (this produces much higher quality because printers have much better resolution than your screen). You can then physically cut up the printout and paste it onto an actual document layout, or you can scan the printout with a scanner and paste the image that produces.
2) Create a new MusEdit document, type the title if you wish, then use Edit | Insert New Object... to insert the sound sample into the document (it's better to insert a link to the sound sample by checking the 'Link' check box, otherwise your MusEdit document will be huge. Linking embeds a pointer to the actual sound file into the MusEdit document; "embedding" actually inserts the sound into the MusEdit document).
3) Play the sound by double-clicking on the .wav file icon in the MusEdit document. You have to have a sound card to hear the sound.
1) Embed the riff in a MusEdit document (use a link to the file) as described in How to embed a sound in a MusEdit document.
2) Insert a Tab line (Ctrl+A), play the sound sample by double clicking on it, then try entering the fingering you think is correct on the tab line.
3) Make note stems visible on the tab line with: View | Show Note Stems on Tab and then add quarter, eighth, sixteenth... note stems to the Tab fingering to get the timing right. Use selection and Options | Join Note Tails to tie notes together where appropriate.
4) Play the music on your guitar or play it as MIDI sound via Options|MIDI|Play Current Document.
5) When the tab version sounds right select the tab line(s) and choose:
Options | Tanslate Current Line(s)... | To Treble and then the treble
version of your tab transcription will appear below the tab lines. You
can now print out both the tab and treble transcriptions if you wish.
You can open various kinds of text files (*.txt, *.tab, *.bta, *.pro, *.crd ) with MusEdit by either using File|Open and selecting the appropriate type from the "Files of type:" list box, or you can simply drag the file's icon onto either the icon (or shortcut) for MusEdit (if it is not open) or onto the open MusEdit window.
There are several ways MusEdit can handle text files, depending on the options set in File|Set Preferences|Translating, Scrolling, Text Files, MIDI. Initially, MusEdit has none of the options checked, which is the situation described here.
When you open the text file a window will appear with the text file
visible. You may get a message "This file doesn't have normal line breaks.
Do you want them inserted automatically?" This means the text file was
probably created on a Mac or a Unix computer, both of which use a different
system to represent "start a new line" from that used by Windows computers.
You probably want to insert breaks, otherwise the whole file will appear
as one long line, so choose yes, and prepare to wait a few seconds... (note,
however, that after line breaks are inserted the file will now have extra
square-shaped symbols if it is now viewed on a Mac). Once line breaks are
inserted you have a Text file, in a Text window (NOT a MusEdit window!)
You can't insert staff, tab or any other MusEdit style lines in this window
-it's more like an ordinary Notepad window.
Note: The first Text File preference allows you to force
MusEdit to insert Windows-style line breaks automatically (without asking
you) if it detects the fact they aren't present.
Example 1: Converting Text-Tab to Graphical Tab
Now you can copy any or all of the text to a MusEdit window if you
wish. First create a new MusEdit window with File|New (or
Ctrl+N). Now go back to the Text window and select everything,
if you wish (use the Windows Notepad sytle short cut to do this: Ctrl+Shift+End),
copy it (Ctrl+C), click on the new MusEdit window, then paste the
text (Ctrl+V). You've now translated all the plain ascii text
lines into a series of MusEdit-style text lines.
Note: The second Text File preference allows you to "Open
text files as MusEdit" meaning MusEdit will automatically convert all the
text to MusEdit-style "text lines" and open them in a MusEdit document,
accomplishing the same as the steps described above.
Now you probably want to change all those text-tab lines (tab lines written as text) into graphical MusEdit tab lines so that they can be easily edited, translated to treble, transposed, etc. To do this you will have to put the caret in the top of each group of six text-tab lines (anywhere in the top line, but do make sure it's the TOP line!) and select Options|Translate Current Line(s)...|To Tab. The graphical tab version of the text lines should appear under the last text-tab line:
Slight corrections might be necessary...
Repeat these translation steps for each group of text-tab lines.
Note: Instead of doing one text-tab group at a time, you
can select the entire document (Ctrl+Shift+E) and then select Options|Translate|To
Tab and MusEdit will scan the entire document for what seem to be text-tab
groups of lines and then automatically translate them to graphical tab,
accomplishing the same as the steps described above.
Also note: The third Text File preference "Auto-translate
text-tab" means that when you open the document MusEdit will do the same
"auto-translate" described in the previous note.
If you want to extract all your newly created tab lines into a purely
graphical file, hit the "Show/hide text lines" button in the main toolbar
(about 2/3 of the way down the row of buttons) -this will hide all the
text lines; then choose Edit|Select Everything (Ctrl+Shift+E);
copy everything (Ctrl+C); create a new MusEdit file (Ctrl+N);
and paste the clipboard into the new file (Ctrl+V). Done!
If all you want is the tab, you can dump the "intermediate files" you created
along the way, but you may want to copy comments, lyrics, etc. from either
the text or the MusEdit file.
Note: The last Text File preference "Remove text-tab after
translation" means that when you open the document MusEdit will do the
same "auto-translate" described in the previous note and then remove the
original text-tab lines, accomplishing the step above. This is risky though,
since you probably want to check MusEdit's translation against the original
lines before removing them!
Example 2: Converting
Chord Names to Chord Diagrams
For this example you would want to open a text file which contains
chord names (eg. A D Fm Cmaj7 etc.), ideally they would be in lines consisting
solely of chord names (eg. above lyrics). Select everything (use
the Windows Notepad style short cut to do this: Ctrl+Shift+End); create
a new MusEdit file; then paste the clipboard into the new file. Once
again, you've translated all the text into MusEdit-style text lines.
The easiest thing to do now is to select everything (Ctrl+Shift+E) then choose Options|Translate Current Line(s)...|To Chord and hopefully all the chords (and only the chords) will translate to chord diagrams. A few things can go wrong however:
1) the chord names must be separated by spaces on each side of each
name:
eg. Am B7 F#m7
is OK,
but AmB7 F#m7(5th fret)
won't work.
2) Some chords may not be recognized eg. Amb7add9Dim5
3) If you select everything then lyric lines containing things such
as
" A cowboy likes beans, and eats ' Em
every day! "
may get translated into two chords ( A and Em )
which you weren't expecting!
Here's an example, using the actual line above ( if you're running MusEdit
right now you can
actually select the line above, and paste it into a MusEdit document,
then translate the line ):
Notice that the B7 chord name shows up, but the chord diagram isn't
visible. That's because it's too close to the Am diagram. If
you insert a couple of spaces in front of the "B7" the chord diagram will
suddenly pop into view when there's room for it.
Example 3: Converting MusEdit tab to text
This is the easiest! Select the tab lines in the MusEdit document,
copy them, and paste them into a text document. Suddenly you'll see
text-tab similar to the sample in example 1 above. This works for
chord lines too!
Ctrl + n = Insert nth previous chord (Ctrl+0 inserts 10th
chord).
In the example below the last two-note chord was
inserted by entering "Ctrl 3" to insert the 3rd chord before the current
position. The final three note chord was inserted by entering "Ctrl
8". Note that the previous two-note chord is counted in this second
case.
Chord: 8 7 6
5 4 3 2
1 Ctrl + 3
Chord: 9 8 7
6 5 4 3
2 1
Ctrl + 8
(not counted as a chords)
Ctrl + Shift + n = Insert nth previous note cluster
Cluster: 5
4 3
1,2 Ctrl+Sh+3
Cluster: 6
5 4
2,3 1
Ctrl+Sh+6
(not counted as clusters) (these two count
as two clusters)
Alt + n = Insert nth previous bar
Bar:
3
2
1
Alt + 3
Bar:
4
3
2
1
Alt + 2
These shortcuts can be really handy. It's amazing how after you've entered few key lines of a piece you can use shortcuts along with cutting and pasting to make the rest of the music entry go really quickly. Austurias is a classical guitar piece which you got as a sample in your MusEdit package. It is ideally suited for shortcuts, so I'll use it as an example:
Suggested procedure for entering this music:
1) Select the chord line whose diagrams are to be made "permanently visible" by putting the caret in the target line and holding Shift+Down Arrow (the line must be selected -it is not sufficient to simplly have the caret in the target line).
2) With the line selected, choose View|Selected Line Chord Diagrams.
3) Toggle chord diagrams to "not visible" (via the View menu or via the tool buttons) and all chord diagrams should be hidden, except for those in the "permanently visible" lines.
To turn off this option for a chord line, select the line and toggle the option again.
Tip: It's handy to use "Split
Windows" with chord diagrams visible in the top part of the window
and only chord names visible in the bottom. It is even possible to
activate scrolling for the bottom half of a split window while leaving
the chord diagrams visible in the top half.
It's safer not to replace the current line since translating TAB fingering
can't always be reversed. For example, in some tunings certain notes
may no longer be playable and so they won't appear on the new tuning.
These dropped notes will not be recovered if you try to translate back
to the original tuning. Also, you may not completely agree with how
MusEdit fingered the new tuning, so it's handy to have the original line
available for reference when you make changes.
In the example below the top line has an arpeggio in standard
tuning. With the caret still the top line (at the end of the line
in this case) Options|Set TAB String Tuning was selected with the
new tuning set to ECFACE (lowest to highest string -the new tuning is shown
at the start of the Tab line):
As you can see, this greatly simplified the arpeggio, not only making
it easier to play, but also freeing left fingers to play more interesting
melodies and embellishmenst, if appropriate.
If you choose View|Show Line Lables you will see that the new lines have the letters AltT (alternate tuning) added to the original labels. This allows them to be differentiated from the original lines, so the two can be shown seperately from one another via View|Line Types to Show|Labeled Lines... When you choose this selection you will get the following dialog:
By double clicking on AltT you can temporarily hide the new lines.
Now you can show just Tab lines (showing only the original Tab lines) select
them all, and delete them. When you show all lines again only the
new alternate tuning lines will remain.
1) If you have both treble and tab versions of the music available, it's easier to enter the treble and let the tab be generated by mutual translation.
2) When you enter treble music the tab version is generated
Entering with the keyboard may seem intimidating when you think you
have to learn many keyboard codes, but in fact the most useful codes will
very quickly be learned (especially if you know the rationale behind the
codes) and then it becomes much quicker to simply type "q", "t", "h", etc.
rather than dragging the mouse around and trying to click it on a specific
staff line. Also, once your hands are on the keyboard typing music
in you will be more inclined to use keyboard shortcuts (such as Ctrl+A
to insert a tab line) and insertion
shortcuts which speed things up even further.
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800-234-0427 
