Piob master 2.3

[Cassie M]

Am toying with putting the Piob master 2.3 on my christmas list for my darling husband and am trying out the trial version at the minute.
It seems a really great way to compose tunes and also to improve music theory knowledge on the way, anyone using this program have any good/bad/indifferent comments they'd like to share before my beloved pays out £50?

[John Chambers]

I have PiobMaster and use it quite often. It is a great program, and allows you to quickly enter notes and embelleshments, and I especially like the way it can be used to copy an paste entire bars of music. Once you become familiar where all of the embellishments are located on the little drop-down menus, it goes rather quickly.

Having said that, now that I've recently gotten into piobaireachd I have found some limitations.

Several of the embellishments used in piob are not available in PiobMaster - but they are in BMW Gold. You can only place text in the heading of the music, which means that you can't annotate variations or enter other text later on down the sheet. Also the music structure is just limited to the choices provided (4 or 8 bars per part). In BMW you can start/end bars wherever you wish (and also place text wherever you wish).

The main advantage of PiobMaster is that music goes in very quickly using "point and click", rather than having to type in codes. The playback mode sure sounds nice though!

Hope this helps,
john

[hornpiper]

I agree with John Chambers, also you can assign keys on your keyboard to notes and what not. Once you key in enough tunes than it seems to go even faster. THe program is great when I am having trouble with sight reading so what I do is enter what I am having trouble with into the program and the program will set me strait

[Dale D. Brown]

I have used the Piob Master 2.3 for the last year and have been exceedingly pleased with the program. I appreciate the point and click procedure. My critical comment is I believe that there are limitations in the piobaireachd presentation. Specifically when you use the abbreviations for tourluaths and crunluath singlings on notes B, low A and low G the stem from the note goes into the abbreviation. The other limitation, as indicated earlier, is the inability to write any text below the title line.

Dale Brown

[DesertSolo]

A ditto on what John said .
Maybe someone should send this thread to the makers so they can make us an upgrade .
:idea:

[Phil Lenihan]

We really like the feature in BMW of adding text anyplace. For learning tunes in the band it is helpful to have line numbers and/or bar numbers. Sometimes you might want to add a note like "drones come in here" or something like that.

Cheers! PHIL

[Dale D. Brown]

I did converse via e-mail with PiobMaster 3 concerning the limitations with piobaireachd as we have noted in this thread. My main disappointment being with the note stem on the lower notes of the scale descending through the tourluath and crunluath symbols. They readily admitted that on piobaireachd there were limitations that they recognized. At this point they had put the piobaireachd palette in because there were so many light music tunes that contained piobaireachd embellishments. With the next update of PiobMaster 3 the piobaireachd capabilities of the program will be addressed and brought up to as they say "as good as can possibly be done". My understanding is that it will be about a year from now.

Dale Brown

[Cassie M]

That's a long wait for a Christmas pressie :( I
think i'll ask for the latest one then update it NEXT Christmas. Thanks for the advice guys.