Printing Support / Skip-to-next-screenfull / Remember Zoom

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mercer
Posts: 1

Post by mercer »

So when first learning a piece, I zoom out all the way and put it on pause (thank you for the new space-bar pause feature, it is a welcome change from trying to slow it down to zero and missing my intended start point - especially since I am on a very slow computer that can't keep up).

From pause, I can then play and learn the notes, then I un-pause, let it scroll forward one screen, and then learn and play those notes, etc. It would be fabulous if the program would remember the zoom level, so that I didn't have to zoom out every time I load a new song. Also, how about a loop feature, or at least an easier way to re-play the current song rather than going back to the start and re-selecting the tracks? (or maybe there already is and I can't find it).

The new pause feature makes this much easier, but it would be fabulous to have a skip-to-next-screen feature, like turning the page of a book I could see the next, static chunk, learn it, and then carry on, etc.

If this is too difficult, maybe just the ability to print the song so I can do this process manually? Right now I'm taking screen captures zoomed-out as far as I can go and using those, but it would be fabulous to have the features in the program.

Thanks for making a great program, nothing else like it that I can find and I use it almost every day. Couldn't play piano without it!

mercer
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

So, it should be saving zoom level on a per-song basis. Do you mean there should be a default zoom for new songs the game has never seen before?

And regarding jumping between "pages", fast-forward can kind of approximate that. It will (for now) jump 3 seconds of song time based on the current speed multiplier. So, at 10% speed, pressing fast-forward will skip ahead 0.3 seconds, but at 400% speed it skips ahead 12 seconds.

The game allows you to zoom out to see a maximum of 10 seconds at a time, so if you set your song speed to 300-330% or so, you would be scrolling by a little less than a page at a time, which would let you sew together the screen captures pretty easily and with little waste.

Otherwise, rendering a score down to an image file is something I hadn't considered. I didn't really imagine the scrolling note view would be very useful in a static format. At that point, sheet music has the advantage because note durations are implied in the notation. It's something I might be able to get to eventually, but right now I'm still trying to focus on the core gameplay and experience.
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Peace
Synthesia Donor
Posts: 21

Post by Peace »

Speaking of printing... Since we're so close to having the sheet music feature fully released, maybe you could concider making synthesia capable of printing the sheet music it interprets from a song in perhaps a .jpg format? I think this would be a tremendous benifit to people like me.

Right now I have a serious dependancy on Synthesia to play anything. I imagine that people who learn to play strictly from sheet music also become somewhat dependant. Without Synthesia in front of me, I'm hopeless, even if I've learned a piece fairly well with it.

I am very excited about the prospect of having sheet music to work with soon, and I fully intend to learn to read it using Synthesia. The only problem is that I expect it might be quite difficult to aquire sheet music that matches the midi files... So even if I can get "portable" sheet music - the old fassioned paper kind, it won't do me a whole lot of good at this stage if it's not exactly what I learned. At least that will be so until I can start to sight read sheet, instead of using it as kind of a reminder of what comes next.

Thanks!
~DOMINUS VOBISCUM~
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

hmm... saving out the sheet music, huh?

And here I just got it to the point where I felt it was barely good enough to let out what is essentially a first draft. I suppose it could be done though and without too much difficulty.

I guess this is one of the areas that I'm excited to see how the upcoming user-feature-voting thing will turn out. People will either recognize that the sheet music has a pretty long way to go and vote those types of improvements up the list, or you guys might like it a lot more than I think you will, and decide it's so good you'd like to have saved versions of it in images. (It's exactly those types of questions I think the voting will answer better than I ever could.)

Still, I just added it to my list along-side the saving of the falling-note display item.
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