Partifi is a free and automated tool for creating parts from music scores.

September 5, 2011 8:58 AM

Partifi is a free and automated tool for creating parts from music scores. Here's how it works.

Instrumental parts are often not available for historical music -- Partifi dramatically streamlines the otherwise manual process of cutting up scores and taping the parts together.

Partifi is made for musicians by musicians. It is a free tool and includes a publicly accessible library of user-contributed parts designed to support and encourage the study and performance of lesser-known early music.

posted by Dr. Fetish (13 comments total)

It's nice that it's free, but a Finale or Sibelius can do this just as simply.
posted by Lutoslawski at 9:44 AM on September 5, 2011

Finale or Sibelius can do this just as simply

Just not for free.
posted by 2N2222 at 10:09 AM on September 5, 2011 [2 favorites]

Actually, to do this in Finale or Sibelius requires OCRing the score in first (using PhotoScore or something), which can be prone to error. This is just literal cut-and-paste of the graphical score, as far as I can tell (which for part-making purposes is all you really need).
posted by dfan at 10:58 AM on September 5, 2011

This is one of those ideas that are so obvious, and yet inevitably take so much work to implement that they don't seem worth doing. From their site:

Partifi is made for musicians by musicians. By freely offering this part-making tool, and by maintaining a publicly accessible library of user-contributed parts, we seek to support and encourage the study and performance of lesser-known early music.

Finally, someone standing up for the unknown 17th-century composers!
posted by ianhattwick at 11:02 AM on September 5, 2011 [2 favorites]

Oh, man, this is pretty neat. And while some folks will scoff at the "LOL UNKNOWN WORKS FROM THE 1600S THIS OBVIOUSLY ISN'T RELEVANT AT ALL" tack, the fact is that, er, yes, some of us do care, and things like this free software will make my life much easier.

Now if I could just find something free that will notate full continuo from figured bass.
posted by sinnesloeschen at 12:12 PM on September 5, 2011

Now if I could just find something free that will notate full continuo from figured bass.

Doesn't getting a fully notated part for your bass line constitute "doing it wrong"? I thought you were supposed to more-or-less wing it within the constraints of the idiom.
posted by kenko at 12:20 PM on September 5, 2011

God, where was this 5 years ago when all I had was a pocket score of a Danzi woodwind quintet....
posted by SNWidget at 1:43 PM on September 5, 2011

Doesn't getting a fully notated part for your bass line constitute "doing it wrong"? I thought you were supposed to more-or-less wing it within the constraints of the idiom.

Sure, but those constraints are pretty formulaic. Plenty of people have the capacity to play a fully notated part, but are less comfortable figuring it out on the fly. Being able to automatically convert from a figured score to an appropriate fully notated score would be a very valuable tool.
posted by KathrynT at 2:22 PM on September 5, 2011 [1 favorite]

"LOL UNKNOWN WORKS FROM THE 1600S THIS OBVIOUSLY ISN'T RELEVANT AT ALL"...the fact is that, er, yes, some of us do care

Yay people who care! :D Of course in the unknown works from the 1500s &c. you have the opposite problem: parts, but no score :P

I'm also reminiscing about that time eight years ago when I had to cut and paste string parts for the entire Marriage of Figaro......this would have been an amazing help.
posted by Thomas Tallis is my Homeboy at 6:59 PM on September 5, 2011 [2 favorites]

Also I don't think pre-realizing a figured bass line is necessarily cheating - if you end up learning it verbatim without ever looking at the figures or being aware of the harmonies then you're missing part of the joy of playing a continuo part, but it can be helpful to see a suggestion for what to play.....
posted by Thomas Tallis is my Homeboy at 7:02 PM on September 5, 2011 [1 favorite]

This is neat! As a composer I've had it drilled into me that there's more to making parts than this (cues! you need cues! or performers will kill you in your sleep) but this should be awesome for when all you have is a PDF and not much time.
posted by speicus at 7:26 PM on September 5, 2011

cues! you need cues! or performers will kill you in your sleep

You know, I could live without cues as long as all of the notes are in the correct range and you write a thought-through part. I've read way too many student compositions where they'll write a note out of the bottom of my range (clearly pulled it from the double bass part) or will consist of a random smattering of notes here and there while everyone else plays straight through. I'm a bassoonist; it's not *flash/bang* punctuational instrument, especially when you've got the entire brass section going behind me.
posted by SNWidget at 1:32 PM on September 6, 2011 [1 favorite]

I tried it out. It seems like this could be handy if you really needed a part from a score when you only had a PDF (like off of IMSLP)...but it's not a substitute for making parts of your own music in Finale or Sibelius. A lot more is required than just cutting and pasting from the score, such as:

-adjusting font size and making everything legible from several feet away (especially for percussionists)
-making sure tempo markings and rehearsal numbers are in every part, in the correct places
- good page turns
- cues (often very necessary)
- fixing a million typesetting errors
- fixing things you wrote which are just plain wrong, which you don't find until you make the parts
- poking yourself in the eyes with sharp objects out of the sheer inanity of part-making, in the end.
posted by daisystomper at 3:53 PM on September 7, 2011