Mike Halloran

Passport Music is not taking upgrades to version 5.x nor are they offering any support. If you Google Encore 5.0.4 for Windows, you may find an old download link. See if that will accept your license.

There’s a note on the home page: “At this time there are no products being sold or none to be downloaded. This will only occur when Encore 6 is released.”

• This reply was modified 2 years, 5 months ago by Mike Halloran.

An Elision is done with an apostrophe if deleting a vowel such as “Ev’ry valley…”

It just occurred to me that you might be referring to Elision‿Slurs for joining syllables from two words under one note. Encore 5 lets you do this by hitting the Command key before the Space bar but does not enter a symbol. You can insert an Elision‿Slur in Encore 5 but it’s a bit funky. I find such a character on a web site, copy it to my clipboard and paste it as needed. Doesn’t work in all fonts and it’s not elegant like the solutions offered in Finale, Sibelius, Dorico and Overture.

Since Elision Slurs already exist in Overture, let’s hope that Don adds this feature to Encore 6. From the Overture 5 User Guide:

“Enter an Elision Slur
To add an elision slur between two syllables type the character ‘^’ between the two syllables. Overture will replace this character with small slur when it displays the lyric on your score.”

(Yes, I checked. This does not work in Encore 5)

I haven’t used MusicTime Deluxe in over 25 years but I remember that, when I switched to Encore, the first thing I did was open my MTD files and save them in the full featured app. Is there any reason why this wouldn’t work for you?

None of the best known notation apps offer an entry level version anymore except Dorico. I’m not being facetious, just trying to understand why you feel a new version of MTD would be needed. Am I missing something?

MIDI doesn’t export or import Text. MusicXML 1.x as it was implemented in Encore 5 can but not everything and no Lyrics or Expressions.

MusicXML 3.0, expected in Encore 6, will handle all of three — it already does in Overture.

I would like to see alternate fonts, too. If not, I would at least like Expressions to be resizable. That tiny Coda has always annoyed me.

Ok I’ll bite.

How are you trying to write an elision? I’ve never had a problem with this in Encore.

I tried posting a reply with links but this forum doesn’t like that. Trying again. You’ll have to Google the apps that I mention.

There are many 3rd party apps that do this now. Even when Finale and Sibelius did it, they partnered with other companies; Finale used SmartScore Lite and Sibelius used PhotoScore Lite for scanning. Finale dropped this with 25.

Since Overture has MusicXML 3.0 import, we can expect Encore 6 to have it also.

The good news is that there are now many apps with different functionality at all price levels. The good ones can scan a tiff or pdf file and export as MusicXML 3.0. MUSIC-to-XML.app works on your iOS or Android smartphone.

Because scans are never perfect, the best ones scan and let you edit in the app before you export the xml. I use SmartScore 64 Professional Edition.
One thing nice about MUSITEK is that if you buy their MUSIC-to-XML app and later decide you should have bought SmartScore 64 Pro.app, there is an upgrade path.

Avid’s stand-alone products, PhotoScore and NotateMe, are SmartScore’s competition.

There are a ton of others apps, some ok and a lot of crapware.

There’s talk of MuseScore offering scanning. Well, yes and no. They have a web service that generates a .mcsz file that you open in MuseScore with varying results when the web service processes your files. (Google it) If you’re lucky and the scan is any good, it can be exported via MusicXML 3.0 for import into Encore 6.

The above is an overview only.

The .musicxml extension requires MusicXML v.3.1 or the newly released v.4.0. Since neither versions have seen wide adoption, don’t expect this in the next Encore release. Even Sibelius skipped v.3.1 and just got 4.0 only a few weeks ago when MakeMusic (Finale) released the Dolet 8 Plug-in for Sibelius (won’t work with any other app).

Overture supports MusicXML version 3.0, as does the current versions of MuseScore, Dorico, Sibelius (without the plug-in), Finale (3.0 is in the drop-down menu) and Notion so this is what I expect.

MusicXm is a toolkit, not a feature that one just adds. How well it is implemented and what features it includes depends on the developer. Some, including Overture, do this better than others.

“undo and scrolling issues.. to name but two..”

You got that right. Undo absolutely sucks in the current versions.

“It is good the way it is…”

I don’t believe that anyone agrees with that when it comes to MusicXML.

Encore’s current MusicXML is v. 1.x and does not support lyrics and expressions among its many failings. It’s not that xml 1 could not support these but MusicXML is a toolkit and it is up to the developer to decide what is implemented and how—and the developer for GVOX used very few features. Version 2.0 was out in 2007, a year or so before Encore 5.

Although xml v.4 has been released by MakeMusic with Finale 27 last year, adoption has been slooooow. Sibelius just got v.4 in the form of a Dolet 8 plug-in from MM a few weeks ago and none of the other notation apps out there are even using v.3.1 (a major update) released in 2017 and first implemented in Finale in mid-2018.

I expect Encore 6 to support MusicXML 3.0 which has been around since 2011 or so with wide adoption. Again, because it is a toolkit, do not expect it to be 100% compatible with other notation apps. Overture and Notion and Finale all handle 3.0 well while Dorico and MuseScore have issues but nothing insurmountable.