CarMusTy now powered by PhTranslator and CFugue

CarMusTy is an all in one environment for typesetting Carnatic music Books. It is a one stop solution to edit Carnatic music notation files, generate MIDI files and typeset portable document format books. The advantages of using CarMusTy for typesetting the Carnatic music, as opposed to using any other editing application (such as Word or other music typesetting systems) are:

• CarMusTy allows Phonetic Transliteration of notation and lyrics. That is, you can enter Carnatic music notation and lyrics once in phonetic english and let CarMuty transliterate the content into multiple languages, such as Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, Hindi etc on the fly.
  
• CarMusTy is compatible with CFugue Carnatic music programming library, which means that the notation you enter in CarMusTy is actually capable of producing music!! Yes, CarMusTy can generate MIDI files from your song notation automatically.
  
• Numerous settings are provided in the application to customize the appearance of song notation and lyrics. CarMusTy generates PDF Books customized to your preferences and the in-built PDF preview window helps you see the output on the fly.
  
• Songs in CarMusTy environment support various attributes, such as Raga, Tala, Author, Composer etc., which will be automatically indexed by CarMusTy and inserted in the generated PDF book.
  
• CarMusTy supports Templates to ease the work of creating new books based on existing documents, and it ships with numerous Default Templates that help new beginners jump start with working on it with ease.
  

 

Note that CarMusTy is a typesetting environment, and not a word processing application. While word processors, such as Microsoft Word, OpenOffice Word etc., help you create and edit documents, typesetting applications, such as CarMusTy, help you publish Books. The difference is the typography finesse. For a book to have the professional level of acceptance, its typography must meet the accepted publishing standards. CarMusTy fully supports the Metric, US and British publishing standards and is built on top of the powerful TEX layout system.

 

As a CarMusTy user, you have access to all this professional quality publishing power right at your fingertips, and the manual at http://carmusty.sourceforge.net/ is a one stop guide to help you master that power. More details about CFugue runtime environment for MIDI score programming can be found at http://gpalem.web.officelive.com/CFugue.html and details on Phonetic Transliteration Library can be found at http://phtranslator.sourceforge.net

 

-Gopalakrishna Palem

Author of CarMusTy Typesetting Environment for Carnatic Music

IBall PF1209 Vs Wacom Intuos3

Ok...I was looking for a digital tablet and I know Wacom Intuos3 is the way to go.

But, the price is something that was bothering me. A decent 12x9 A4 Intuos3 will cost you around Rs 20,000/-.

While I was hesitating on it, I came across this IBall PF1209 digital tablet pen. It costs around Rs 9000/- and comes in A4 9x12 size.

Now, the big question for me was, with half the price of Intuos3, will PF1209 compromise on quality too?

I have compared the technical specifications of both products.

Both have a pressure sensitivity levels of 1024, Report rate of 200rps, and tilt angle detection up to 60 degrees. Till this point, technically they are same.

But, the difference was with Resolution. While Intuos boasted about 5000 lpi (lines per inch), PF1209 simply put it at 2000 lpi. Does the reduced resolution affect the sensitivity? There is only one way to find out. By actually testing it.

When I connected the tablet to an XP machine, it started functioning right away. The USB detected the PF1209 as is and worked fine with PaintBrush etc... However, you have to install the supplied drivers to start using the 'pressure sensitivity' option. Once the drivers are installed, you can control the 'sensitivity' to your liking.

Once all drivers are setup, you would find the PF1209 to be performing excellently. It is accurate and responsive. You would need to train yourself a little bit with the pressure sensitivity though.

Another big difference you would find between Intuos3 and PF1209 is that the former has additional button and touch strip on the tablet itself, which makes it very convenient to work with. The PF1209 does not have any buttons on it - but wait, it has a whole horizontal software 'programmable' line near its top, that makes you forget the hardware buttons.

On the top of PF1209 active area, you can find many quick access 'soft' buttons (that you click with the pen to simulate that action). The buttons are 'New', 'open', 'copy', 'paste', 'undo, 'redo' etc... All these are programmable through the driver software that ships with the product.

All in all, this is a great product in reasonable price. May be less in price than Intuos 3, but does not lack in features or quality. Highly recommended.

By,
Gopalakrishna Palem
http://www.geocities.com/krishnapg/