Re: Features for a new release. (was Re: [Denemo-devel] Midi output faulty for whole measure rests in 4/2 time)

[Richard Shann]

On Thu, 2008-10-30 at 09:09 -0500, Jeremiah Benham wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-10-30 at 11:35 +0100, Nils Gey wrote:
> > Hi people,
> > 
> > a few thought about this topic.
> > 
> > 1)There are two ways to enter midi to get notation:
> >   a)Enter them one after another, without timing information. You choose 
> > the length (half, quarter...) of the Note in Denemo and then press a midi 
> > key or a chord (any note that is played a few ms after the first belongs to 
> > the chord) and its entered to the currently selected staff at the cursor 
> > position. For me, in the past, that was the most quick and reliable way to 
> > get clean notation out of midi. If you want to Notate via a Midiinstrument 
> > I would suggest this method.
> 
> I could add this feature for next release.
That would be really great. Notice that you are not limited to choosing
a simple duration (half, quarter ...) you can choose "dotted quarter
eighth" so long as you have it selected on the Rhythms menu bar. Ask if
it is not obvious how this works, (in fact the prevailing note length
are just sequences consisting of a single note).

>  I would prefer chords to be
> entered via the foot sustain pedal. 
This would be excellent - keeping your hands in playing position on the
music-keyboard is very important for some when continuously playing in
music. Do you generally have a second pedal available on these things (I
guess it would be labelled Una Corda if there is one)? If so this could
be used as a shortcut too.
> When I do step entry I enter the
> notes in so fast that it would think it was a chord for sure if I used a
> timing method. I timing method could be used for people who don't have a
> foot pedal. I think maybe triggered by overlap of more than one note
> longer than a few ms. I think the foot pedal could be used for a control
> mode also. Maybe if the pedal is hit alone and then released then next
> key would change the rhythm a=0, b=1, c=2, d=3, e=4, 
It is impractical to cycle through all the durations to get the one you
want - Instead you would put the durations you are need on the rhythm
menubar and cycle through them with the NextRhythm command. You can
always switch to the Note/Rest Entry toolbar for an occasional duration
that you don't have on the Rhythm toolbar.
> this would not work
> for rests or dotted notes though. The user would still have to move her
> hands to the computer keyboard. 
Or dedicate, say, an octave of notes at the bottom/top of the
music-keyboard to selecting rhythms/durations. This could be done as a
direct selection - the bottom 5 notes (say) corresponding the set of 5
durations/rhythms placed on the rhythm toolbar. If you are not cycling
through the durations/rhythms you can afford to keep more of them posted
up on the rhythm toolbar. (In fact, it would be worth storing the
rhythms at program close and restoring them when re-starting the
program, so that certain common rhythms (dotted eighth, sixteenth note)
would be ready for use right away.
>    
> 
> I know how to implement this using alsa and oss methods. This won't work
> in windows. I would need to learn how this is done with portaudio to get
> that to work on windows. 
portaudio does not have midi, it is just digital audio (i.e. samples); I
don't think we should hold up development for anything that windows is
missing.
> 
> >   b)Real-time-recording, as you know and discussed, is to have a metronome 
> > or some time-signal and then play along. I have never seen any application 
> > that does good work and I tried many. You will need heavy quantisatzion(?) 
> > and lots of human work after you recorded to correct everything. Drum 
> > notation is even more a pain to record. Live-recording is normally for 
> > non-notation people with pianoroll and all this sequencer-things. I suggest 
> > to drop that feature and if you want a more "humanized" playback there are 
> > other ways (for example via scripts) .
> 
> Yeah. I always found setting quantization confusing. Some people I know
> at work enter notation in this way. Piano is their main instrument
> though. 
I agree we should leave this - there is a huge problem in the
user-interface to this stuff. Doing simple things well is much better
than trying to do complex things and failing to get it 100%. Above all,
it needs to be obvious what is happening all the time, and obvious how
to fix mistakes.
Richard