Under the Covers – Notation

A few days ago John asked a great question over on our Facebook Page:

Could you tell me if it’s possible to copy some of the sheet music that’s on my Wersi OAX onto a USB stick, so I can transfer them onto my computer then use my music notation program to change some tunes into a key that I like to use. If so can you tell me how to copy the sheet music onto a USB stick?

After a little digging the short answer is No – 🙁 But, let me share what I do know and see if anyone else can add to that.

First – DON’T try this unless you are very comfortable with Windows and can restore your instrument should you click on the wrong thing by accident! – Did we mention USE AT YOUR OWN RISK?  Ok, now let’s have some fun!

The first question is where are the notation files stored? That one is pretty easy. You can find them in the directory C:\WERSI\Scores\Fact (there is also a directory called C:\WERSI\Scores\user where any notation files you upload are stored). You might notice two things? The name of the file (N0000_0) and the file extension of “dat.” Here are the first few files:

C:\WERSI\Scores\Fact>dir
Volume in drive C has no label.
Volume Serial Number is 95A7-74C4

Directory of C:\WERSI\Scores\Fact

01/07/2017 12:10 PM <DIR> .
01/07/2017 12:10 PM <DIR> ..
12/12/2015 06:56 AM 52,559 N0000_0.dat
12/12/2015 07:08 AM 59,384 N0001_0.dat

That name doesn’t match up to anything we recognize unless you happen to have access to Microsoft Access or some utility that can open and read an Access Database. We copied the Access database from our Sonic to another PC where we have Access installed. There is a ton of very interesting data in there, but we are only going to show you info from the table called “Fact_TableScores_New”. Here’s what the first few lines look like (Click on it to make it big enough to read):

Access_DB_Notation

Look under the column titled “SongSheet” and notice the first two entries in this table match the first two files in the directory we listed out above. So, now we know that the file called N0000_0.dat is the notation for the tune called Verde – Ricky King. You can figure out the next one.

Now, comes the problem. We have no idea of what program is needed to properly open and display those files. We copied the first file and opened it up to find only one clue.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

No idea that this is/isn’t file that you could open in Photoshop or not. We don’t own Photoshop and have never used it. We do know that *.dat is not the default extension used by Photoshop.

At this point, we will open up for comments from others. Anyone have thoughts on how to properly open the files so John can transfer and use on another device? It very well may be that Wersi does their own file encode and decode, but I suspect they are using some off the shelf utility rather than writing their own utility for that. I’ll also add that we have loaded a few of our own notation files. Those were originally in *.jpg format but are now saved on the organ in the mysterious *.dat format.

John – Suspect this isn’t the answer you were looking for, but we do have a group of smart folks following along. Perhaps someone will have some ideas for next steps.