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Music Notes

Posted: Sun Oct 14, 2018 1:58 am
by MattS156
I notice quite often that pound signs or other characters are used where music lines are placed. If you'd like to use actual notes in your subtitles, here's how:

In pretty much any editor, you can enter notes using Alt 13 (♪) or Alt 14 (♫), but there's a catch. You have to use the number pad on your keyboard. The numbers above the QWERTY keys don't work for this.

There's one more catch. The file has to be saved as UTF-8 or an equivalent format. Saving as ASCII will convert the notes to an unrecognized character.

Hope this helps.

Re: Music Notes

Posted: Sun Oct 14, 2018 11:47 am
by SmallBrother
Thanks for the tip and explanation.

In a way it also explains why the # sign is often used. The # is part of 'Low ASCII', a very basic character set, and therefore easily displayed, as easy as the letter A or B. There are good reasons to use the UFT-8 character set, and good reasons not to, and instead use some language specific character set. Some subtitlers choose not to use UTF-8 and so they cannot use ♪ or ♫. That's where the # comes in.

Re: Music Notes

Posted: Tue Oct 16, 2018 1:20 pm
by svaraej
Another thing about the note symbols. I was in a discussion some time ago (can't remember where) about which symbol to use, the eighth note (♪) or the beamed eighth note (♫). We did some research and testing and found that the eighth note (♪) was compatible with more fonts than the beamed eighth note (♫).

Just something to think about when creating subs :)