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Posted: 07-11-18 10:54 am
by RickyRister
I've been thinking of getting into the piano arrangement scene, so I decided to finally pony up and get Synthesia in order to record my midis. To my dismay, I can't figure out how to collapse the menus during playback. For reference, I want my thing to look like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFBNWLYR7zE but right now I can't seem to change it from [see attachment]. I tried googling but there's a surprising lack of information about Synthesia online.
Spoiler:
Screenshot 2018-07-11 10.51.12.png
Screenshot 2018-07-11 10.51.12.png (696.11 KiB) Viewed 3572 times

Posted: 07-11-18 11:08 am
by Nicholas
(For what it's worth, in that YouTube video, they've used editing software to crop out the menu bar completely. There isn't and hasn't ever been a way to do that in the app. But there is something close!)

What a funny coincidence: I just spent the last hour making this feature more visible and more useful. :D

Today (in Synthesia 10.4) it's a little hard to find:
1. Hold your Shift key while launching Synthesia to open the configuration window.
2. Find the "Gameplay.PinMenuDrawerOpen" option in the list.
3. Remove the check from the Value box.

Once you close the window and start Synthesia normally, the top bar should be mostly tucked away whenever the mouse isn't near the top of the screen.

Starting in 10.5, that option will be right on the Settings --> Gameplay screen, so it'll be a lot easier to change (and available on the tablet versions of Synthesia for the first time). And, instead of it relying on your mouse's vertical position, it's going to behave much more familiarly like every video player: any mouse move or click will slide it out for a couple seconds (and it will remain out whenever the song is paused).

EDIT: And 40,000 posts here is plenty of information about Synthesia online! :lol:

Posted: 07-11-18 10:58 pm
by RickyRister
Thank you for your prompt reply! For the record, google search results don't seem to pick up posts from this forum.

One last question: How do I get Synthesia to play a soundfont? Apparently there's something about VirtualMIDISynth but I'm on Mac. There's also some stuff about dls files but that's more of a last resort kind of thing if I can't get the soundfont to work.

Posted: 07-12-18 9:38 am
by Nicholas
(I've often wondered why Google seems hesitant to show forum search results. Their bot scans the forum often-enough. Hmm.)

On Mac -- outside of the DLS stuff -- there isn't an easy solution that I know about. All the third-party synths seem to be Windows-only.

If you already had something else with nicer sounds, you could always use macOS's built-in IAC MIDI driver to send Synthesia's output to some other app.