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Hi,
I'm new here and I have a few questions I 'm an old analog guy. I wrote a bunch of music back in the day that I want to convert to digital ( it's on paper now) What's the best way to do that?
second, I bought a Microsoft Surface Pro with maxed out ram and a terabit hard drive, I'm a long time Fractal Audio User and use a FM9 as my main rig and I use the Surface for editing etc.
Long term I want to get some recording software and use it to produce what aI wrote. I' m not sure where to start.
One question I have is, did I buy the wrong computer? It's convenient for editing and I can use it as a pdf reader
Any thoughts?
I got a free app called Staff pad that converts your handwriting to music but it doesn't seem to be too intuitive to me. Anyone familiar with it?
Thanks!
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03-26-2025 03:31 PM
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Oh, you may have bought the wrong computer. I know a guy who got this a few years back, struggled with it for a long time and replaced it with some Apple stuff. His main complaint was "it is almost working, everything almost works"
But it was years ago. Maybe there are improvements by now.
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Welcome ... Freudian slip?
Originally Posted by jzgtrguy
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My Surface has an I7 chip 32 gigs of ram and a tera bit hard drive. seems like enough My concern is also ins and outs I have a Surface doc expander dongle that gives me extra ports USB and USBC and a something for a printer cable and a aux screen. Being a newbie to recording I have no idea if that's enough
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Originally Posted by jzgtrguy
Google search finds dozens of actual "in use" YT on nearly every generation Surface pro...
S
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The amount of RAM and storage has nothing to do with whether software works, or how. I can't really say much about a Surface, because I've never owned one, and I haven't had anything running Windows in well over a decade. It might work fine, but it depends entirely on the available software.
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As long as you have enough of both... Originally Posted by sgosnell
The OP should be fine though, I think.
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It’s more than that. There are many different architectures and interfaces between the CPU and both RAM and “storage” (in quotes since RAM is just temporary storage). Even with “enough” RAM and drive capacity, transfer speeds and rates (ie how much data can be transferred in and out per unit if time) also affect if and how well software will function. For example, DDR3 RAM is limited to 2133 Mb / sec. DDR4 ups it to 3200 and DDR5 has a max rate of 6400. Originally Posted by RJVB
There’s also latency in internal data access. How quickly memory responds to requests from the CPU is at least as important as transfer rates when running programs that are constantly accessing RAM, such as multitrack audio recording with real time use of multiple VST plugins plus output monitoring.
I still use a 2006 Toshiba Satellite laptop as a workhorse portable. It’s a 1.6 gig dual core dinosaur with 533 MHz RAM. I’ve upgraded the CPU, stuffed in 8 gigs of RAM, swapped the internal HDD for an SSD, and run Ubuntu Studio on it for years. Ardour is the DAW in UStudio, and the machine meets or exceeds minimum system requirements for all of the software on it. It works fine for 2 track stereo recording with input monitoring, but it stutters, spools, and gets very noisy (the recordings, not the computer) when I try to build a sextet with multiple VST plugins and the real time output monitoring necessary to synch each track with those already laid down.
It’s even worse for video editing. So capacity is only one factor - there are others to consider if you’re going beyond simple stereo recording.
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Writing music on Staffpad successfully is like learning to play an instrument,it takes a lot of practice.The instruments that come with the app are not that realistic sounding.If you eventually get to like it you might want to purchase the addon libraries that sound very good.Staffpad is supposed to merge with MuseStudio sometime in the near future and the libraries for both are to be interchangeable.
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Compared to a maxed out and (presumably) new/current MSurface Pro as the OP has that is indeed a satellite in a very far orbit... Originally Posted by nevershouldhavesoldit
Still, I don't see why the music it produces would get noisy unless you're forcing it to do real-time production at "release" quality.
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If I had a lot of music on paper that I wanted to get onto a computer in digital form, I would ask a keyboard player with a MIDI keyboard to play it into the computer for perhaps a fee. You'd need a music program that accepts MIDI input and a computer interface that accepts MIDI input like a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4.
As an alternative, you could use a music program that has MIDI capability, and also has a "pianoroll" interface. You could use a mouse to click in your music on the pianoroll interface note by note. It's tedious but doable.
There are also music programs that understand music notation, and you could enter the music onto a staff by hand.
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If you want to enter hand written scores into a digital music notation program like Sibelius or MuseScore then you will have to do it manually as far as I know. If your scores are in PDF format there are programs that supposedly convert them to MuseScore format for instance but I have never tried that and I expect there will be some editing involved
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