Working With MusicXML in Cubase

today we talk about

Working With MusicXML in Cubase

hello everybody Andrew Blake from thedigitalaudiomanual.com today let's talkabout music XML in the score in Cubasebut before we start I want to remind youthat there's a link below to the freecontent navigation guide which is aneasy to navigate webpage with links toall the content on this channel andbesides that in the near future I'mgoing to begin adding tips and otherbits of information that will only beavailable there you know things likesimple steps that will get you startedand up and running quick things that arein the videos but are written down insimple steps that serve as quickreminders when you need information downthe road if you're working with programslike wavelab or Cubase plugins or thecable guys shaper box and many manyother projects that are in the worksthen I know you're going to find justlike I have that this is an invaluablestudy Aid and the other thing I want tomake sure you understand is that this isnot a simple PDF this is a constantlyupdated page that has any informationthat is new or anytime videos are it'sreally anything updated and once youhave it you will always have the latestinformation constantly updated so if youhaven't gotten it already go to the linkbelow click on it and save it to yourfavorites it's my gift to you and it'sabsolutely free Okay so let's getstarted so this idea of Music XML in thescore I've always personally been veryinterested in it I've seen variouspeople demonstrate it and it seems likea really fun optionand yet I have failed at accomplishingit so many times so I want to kind ofbring you through my journey because nowI do know how to make it work andhopefully I can save you some of theaggravation I went through when youfinally successfully open up a music XMLfile you'll get a piece of sheet musiclike we're looking at here and the scorewill be able to play itnow besides the music XML you also havethe option to open up midi files and youwill get a similar result so you canthink of it now that there's two waysyou got the music XML and you have theMIDI files just focus on this music XMLfor a minute because I want to show youif you're interested how you canaccomplish the same thing to get thepicture we have to kind of go back aminute and understand that there's acompany called record dare LLC that in2000 developed this music XML notationand this is what Cubase recognizes if wetry to look for this company this recordair LLC let's say I go to Google and Itype inwww.recordare.com when I do my searchand enter for that instead of going torecord dare.com go to musicxml.com so atsome point that must have changed I haveto assume that but supposedly here's thecompany that brought us the music XMLnow what I want to call your attentionto of course there's a lot of things youcould browse here to learn about thefirst link it gives us says music I wantto click on that if you experienceanything like me you've done searchestrying to find sites where you candownload these music XML files tohopefully open them up in Cubase and usethem and of course the first thing we'regoing to want to do is try to find freeones right well when we go to the musictab on this site we are given this longlist of all these potential sites thatallow you to download music XML filesand this is a fun place to browse at thesame time it becomes very overwhelmingvery quickly once you start clicking onthese links find yourself on an endlesssearch and things will not just presentthemselves like oh here's an XML fileyou'll be given all kinds of differentoptions understand that if you'regetting ready to search but let menarrow this down for a minute we'regoing to use this example that says theMuse score.com because this one says ithas downloads of over 1.5 million scoresseems like anyone should be able to findsomething they're interested in withthat many scores if I click on this kindof brought to a site that looks like ithas various kind of teaching courses butif I scroll down the list here's where Istart to see actual musical scores andone thing you're going to see right awayunderneath these scores is the word Probecause again if you're going to reallyuse this site and subscribe to the proit's going to cost you 49 to have thatsubscription now I'm all for paying fora site if you're going to get what youwant when I first went through this andstarted experiencing it I downloadedsome of these scores as a test and Istill couldn't get them to open up inCubase so what good would it do me tospend 49 dollars if I get a bunch ofscores I can't actually open up andhere's where it gets a little deeper interms of things you need to understandthat where the information is just noteasily found first of all there are freescores on this site and that's whatmakes this site pretty intriguing rightaway because you can actually get somefree stuff at least to test what you'relooking for and then if you like it youcan go further so let's look at wherethe free stuff is basically if you findanything that says public domain anddoes not say Pro below it you're ontrack to find something that you candownload for free now if I click onsomething that I like and I find ittypically like this Chopin walls so youcan play this and audition it and youhave an option for a mixer to turn it upand down all of these things come in amore premium version if I play this foryou right now it's going to play veryloud but understand you can auditionyour scores so assuming we havesomething we like and we actually wantto download it now I'm going to move onand go over into this right area whereI'm actually given the option todownload and I'm going to download it soI click on it as we can see it gives usa whole bunch of options we can get itin the Muse score format we can get itas a PDF here's what we're looking forwe can get it as a music XML file youcan also get it as a midi file which wewere talking about a little while agoand we can get an audio file if we justwant to listen to it but I want to getthis music XML because I want to takeadvantage of this option so I click onthis so I'm going to create a new folderfor our new test here call it xml2here's the first wrinkle to understandgetting ready to download my new freefile that's an XML file but when I lookdown at the bottom at the save as typefile it's not XML on the other hand itsays MXL now some of you experiencedusers out there may know exactly whereI'm going to go with this in a littlebit but I'm taking the people throughthis don't know what this is about sothat you will understand how to getaround all this stuff first when I sawthis I thought it was a typo after allit's the same letters I'm looking forXML but this says MXL I'm going to goahead and save it anyway I'm going toclose this site down now and now I'mgoing to go back into Cubase and thesteps for opening up an XML file onceyou've actually downloaded it to go overto your file come down to the importoption and then look over and you'll seean option that says music XML I'm goingto take that option so far so good rightseems like it's all making sense so I goup to my new folder that says my xml2and when I click on it it shows nothingin the folder I know I downloadedsomething I come down to the right andit says types of XML files so I'mthinking well maybe because of the typoon the extension so I experiment furtherand look at my files and instead ofgoing with the XML files here I'll justtake the one that says any type and nowsomething shows up here but again itsays dot MXL and we need it to say dotXML but I'm going to pretend like it'sworking so I'm going to click on thisthen another window opens and it saysselect a folder and I'm not getting anyinformation why it would tell me thisbut after some experimentation I findout Cubase is now prompting me to createa new project folder so once I realizeit's telling me to do that I just goahead and create a new folder I'll callthis project two I'm going to select myfolder and here's what I get an errorthat says fail to parse the file andthis is the only error I have evergotten I've tried this over many yearsand because I wasn't that intense onsolving the problem I would usually justwalk away or I would take the optionlike I've talked about earlier ofdownloading a midi file and then I wouldgo that way but the option to actuallyget an XML file in here continued toelude me so what is the problem here whyare we getting that bad extension andwhy are we failing at being able toactually open the file up I must saythat at first I started to think thatmaybe it was this Muse score site andmaybe all their extensions were justturned around thing MXL instead of XMLand maybe I'd have better luck if I justwent to a different site so with thatbit of information I went on my journeyagain back to the music XML site anddecided maybe to try a different site wehave you know 30 sites here why not trysomething else so instead I went to thismusicalian I tried this site and I findout there's over seventy thousand scoresdownloaded so I looked down my list andI have various options I see one herethat says popular composers so I'm goingto take that and then in my list ofcomposers I see Bach at the top of thelist I'll take that one and again I seea score I'll just take it and then thisone same thing I can preview it if Iwant to hear it I'm going to go to theoption that says download and at thebottom of the list I see music XML ohgreat here's what I'm looking for so Iclick on it and then I find doubt aslong as I pay for the site I can startdownloading now it doesn't matterwhether the score is going to work inCubase or not because I get to just payfor the site first so more and more I'mfinding these options are just notworking out for me then I just triedvarious Google searches to try to findmusic XML files I hit on some kind ofnews answer with somebody was explainingthat and get ready for it here's themagic key the music MXL files arebasically zipped files that have to beextracted and in those files are yourmusic XML files now no one for the manyyears that I have been trying to do thishas ever told me that or ever explainedthat and that was truly a light bulbmoment so I closed everything down mywindows system has an extraction zipfile extraction on it but for somereason it wasn't working when I wastrying to do any kind of extraction soagain I find a recommendation for thisprogram 7-Zip and I can tell you thatdid the job many of you may already havesome kind of file extractor but I'm justgonna let you know this one did work soanyway once I found the 7-Zip file andthen I put my file in here for in thiscase this Mozart file and then I hit theextract button amazingly now a new fileappears saying score dot XML and here'sthe magic key that we need so closingall of this out and once again goingdown to import down to my music XML andthen finding the folder where Iextracted my files now I have a filehere that actually appears with the XMLextension now the same thing appliesthough when I double click on this againI'm given another window which is Cubasesaying I need to create a project folderso that's another step that can be veryconfusing but once you create theproject folder and you say select in afew seconds you will then be looking atan actual music XML file which you canthen play in Cubase foreignthere you go now you can startdownloading some music XML files but ifyou know they come in as MXL filesyou've got to unzip them first and thenyou can open them up in the Cubase scoreall right it's going to wrap it up fortoday as always if you haven't grabbedyour navigation guide be sure to grabthat from the link below this videogives you quick easy access to all thecontent on the channel ever growing andfree to use content is in ordercontinually being updated there to helpyou and it's there to help me doyourself a favor click on it download itsave it to your favorites use itwhenever you need it so do you know howto download a music XML file now do youknow the difference between a music XMLand a music MXL I certainly hope so Iknow I didn't for the longest time buthey like they say knowledge is power wehave a few more things to talk about inthe score we are definitely gettingtowards the end of this information it'sbeen a heck of a journey and lookingback at where we've come from to wherewe are a lot of information gathered aswe continue on we will pick it up nexttime as always it's great to have youguys here and I'll see you on the nextvideo