new to dtab - few questions

[detroit54]

Hi,

I downloaded this program a while ago looking for something to provide drum backing tracks for guitar and bass, and finally played around with the program in depth last night.  I started out with Sober by Tool.  I noticed a few things that don't work for me and wanted to ask about them.

When I set the special feature to double, a "d" shows up on the tab but when I play the bar or song there is no sound when there should be doubles.  To overcome this, I just put in two 32nd notes for now.  It also seems that flam doesn't work for the cymbals -- is there a list of which special features can be used with the various drums?  The ghost notes don't play for all drums either.  I'm not a drummer, so maybe this is part of the basics.

Is there a way to gradually make the drums play from soft to loud?  For now I just did something like "ggggggooooooOOOOOO."

I tried to copy an entire section named "Chorus" to a section called "Chorus #2."  The section was copied in the tab, but when I went to play it all through it would skip over Chorus #2 and start over at the beginning again.  Is there something I did not do that would make this work?  Wound up using a bunch of ctrl-c and ctrl-v combinations to make the song play through.

It seems that there ought to be a way to import a text drum tab if it were in the correct format (i.e. instrument order, spacing, etc.).  Is there a way to do this?  Or is there a conversion utility to put a formatted text file into the dtab format?

Also, where can I find more songs in dtab format?  I've checked the forum and downloaded a few, but there don't seem to be many here.

- Dan

[kevin]

Howdy,

When I set the special feature to double, a "d" shows up on the tab but when I play the bar or song there is no sound when there should be doubles. To overcome this, I just put in two 32nd notes for now. It also seems that flam doesn't work for the cymbals -- is there a list of which special features can be used with the various drums? The ghost notes don't play for all drums either. I'm not a drummer, so maybe this is part of the basics.

Play back of doubles and most of the rudiments aren't supported. The reason for this, is the existing play back routines hog up the system timer way  too much, to make it viable (i.e. it made play back hiccup all the time).  Play back in dtab, in it's current form, was actually an after thought.  It's certainly not designed as a sequencer.    

The new play back engine (dtab v0.71) handles them easily, but unfortunately a new release of Dtab is still some time off.  At this rate, I'd say Jan/Feb 2004.  

Is there a way to gradually make the drums play from soft to loud? For now I just did something like "ggggggooooooOOOOOO."

Nope crescendo, and decrescendo are also not supported.

I tried to copy an entire section named "Chorus" to a section called "Chorus #2." The section was copied in the tab, but when I went to play it all through it would skip over Chorus #2 and start over at the beginning again. Is there something I did not do that would make this work? Wound up using a bunch of ctrl-c and ctrl-v combinations to make the song play through.

If the section copied, and the structure was still intact, it should play as normal.  There was a copy section problem in 0.52, hence the release of 0.52b soon after.  the only thing i can think of, may be it's not reporting the song length correctly if you paste to a section way beyond the current last note in song.

However there is a known bug, if you turn off 'loop' for playback.

It seems that there ought to be a way to import a text drum tab if it were in the correct format (i.e. instrument order, spacing, etc.). Is there a way to do this? Or is there a conversion utility to put a formatted text file into the dtab format?

Currently, nope.  While it's possible, and it's something that is desperately needed, i certainly don't know of any tool that does it.  The primary focus on the new version, is in re-building the core of the program (which adds the majority of missed functionality). This process was underway some months back, but has been delayed due to other obligations.

Although,  I might actually have a go at the stand alone TXT to DTB in the coming weeks.  It'll be loose as, but certainly a time saver.

Also, where can I find more songs in dtab format? I've checked the forum and downloaded a few, but there don't seem to be many here.

Most users whom I've talked too, are actually rather unwilling to release DTB files, but more than happy to release TXT versions.   Unfortunately what seems to happen, is people grab the DTB files, export/upload them as Tabs on other sites, as their own work.