10 Preview r3209-r3255 - Custom Hand Assignments

Archived development update discussion from past versions
Archived development updates.
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

PREVIEW r3209
Download from the pink box above.

Image


See the new Assigning Hands guide.


MAJOR IMPROVEMENTS
  • Hand assignment and "Played by X" have been combined in a way that makes a lot more sense.
  • Choosing "Custom" for a track's hand assignment opens a new screen that allows you to choose left/right/background on a note-by-note basis.
  • From the same screen, you can "discard" a note, which will hide and mute just that note.
  • MIDI channel number is now shown in each track box (to help map things to VSTi, etc.).
  • The Simple/Advanced views no longer duplicate any functionality and have much clearer defined roles.
  • Sheet music can now be shown or hidden during play (it auto generates for the current hand selection).
  • Music output devices now have an "Output Channel" setting, which is handy for older keyboards that don't listen on all channels.
SMALLER CHANGES
  • User pitch bend events are now sent to output.
  • Key lights now persist for the entire duration of a note.
  • Removed a few more command line options. (Sorry again, TonE!)
  • The vertical divider lines between B/C and E/F are now shaded alternately to help quickly find your place on the keyboard.
  • Substantially improved MIDI loading speed.
  • Large MIDI songs now consume much less memory.
  • Improved anonymous analytics to include whole performances. (This enables lots of cool future features!)
  • Advanced option to allow Free Play to send events using all MIDI channels.
  • Shimmied our pause controls down onto the keyboard to make more room in the falling note area.
  • Loops no longer show as looped while creating loops. ;)
FIXES
  • Bookmarks can now be created at the very beginning of a song.
  • Bookmarks and finger hints can now be changed after the end of a loop once again.
  • Measure lines no longer jitter at slow song speeds (finally)!
  • Synthesia now only prevents screensavers when it's active.
  • The OpenGL renderer should no longer show texture filtering artifacts.
  • SysEx events are no longer duplicated (many times!) while loading format 0 songs.
  • Improved "Synthesia already running" detection, which should help prevent data file corruption.
  • Improved data file writing to hopefully (once again) avoid data corruption.
  • Don’t consume 100% CPU on OS X when the Synthesia window is in the background.
  • Loops that start at the beginning of the song will no longer reset their stats each loop.
  • Fixed a crash during... crash uploading.
  • Synthesia now internally keeps track of time much more accurately. (E.g., the FPS counter now jitters much less.)
  • Tablet password boxes now show the last-typed character correctly.
  • Flagged the Windows executable to allow >1GB of RAM usage, for gigantic MIDI files.
  • Improved touch input on Windows.
  • A few finger hint fixes to the built-in songs.
  • A few language fixes.
Track splitting! Well... it's more like per-note hand assignments. The track itself doesn't actually turn into multiple tracks.

Let's see. Colors merged with shown/hidden. Hands merged with Played by Me/Synthesia. Sheet music moved right to the play screen. The "Advanced" view isn't very advanced anymore (and is one step away from being merged right into what used to be called the "Simple" view).

Lots and lots of things changed under the hood. Things got a lot simpler without sacrificing any capability -- I'd describe it as Synthesia now expresses its ideas more clearly -- but you should still expect to find some quirkiness. Changing that much all at once is bound to leave a few loose ends. Let me know if you spot anything that doesn't look right! Thanks!
kiwi
Synthesia Donor
Posts: 1180

Post by kiwi »

Yeah! i go to play with it now :)
Thank you Nicholas
Channel on tracks=>awesome!
Edit: just replaced ui.xml and colors.xml for to be working.
Edit2: Feature request "continue" button" when we are on the channel & instruments screen i spend a lot of time here rather than in play both hand etc...
Edit3: the split feature is really easy to use congrats on this! It would be great to have the same function on free play mode (great for making tutorial)
Edit4: the abilty to mute or to hide a custom part is really good to use! Awesome.
Last edited by kiwi on 11-07-14 12:43 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

kiwi wrote:Feature request "continue" button" when we are on the channel & instruments screen...
In Synthesia 12 it's just going to become one screen. The parts will be shown in the bottom half (and ALL the other tabs are going elsewhere). Actually, a lot will be changing on that screen in 12. ;)

Until then, without knowing which hand you want to play, there isn't an easy way to continue from that screen anymore.
kiwi
Synthesia Donor
Posts: 1180

Post by kiwi »

Arf on 12 ? but we are on ten version i am confused just for a little button? previous versions had this button :p
But all in one screen we 'll be really good :)
By the way ability to mute a custom channel splitted (left hand per eg) is really good for the Learning process).
Just a thing is it possible to split at another point of the song? i haven't found the way to do this.
Eg: i split to c3 at 2.50 mn then i want to split to c2 at 3mn.
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

Until today the "Simple" and "Advanced" screens did exactly the same thing. Just two different, confusing ways of doing the same stuff.

Now the things you can do on each of those is 100% distinct. There isn't a duplicated setting between them. What used to be the "Advanced" view is where you describe how Synthesia should interpret each part in the song. What used to be the "Simple" view is the only place you describe how you actually want to interact with those parts. So the only place you can advance is when Synthesia knows how you want to interact.

It's not enough to set those interactions once and then be able to continue from the Advanced view either: you can change things in there that can remove an entire hand or do even worse. (You can do silly things now like "discard" all notes in all tracks. Not sure why you'd want to, but the power is there.)
kiwi wrote:Just a thing is it possible to split at another point of the song?
To keep it easy, the big tool is just "whole song". After that, you can right-click-drag to refine.

So whole-song split where it'll give you the most correct notes, and then go through a page at a time (Left Arrow and Right Arrow scroll nice and smoothly!) and use the line-drawing tool to fix small mistakes.
kiwi
Synthesia Donor
Posts: 1180

Post by kiwi »

I am agree for the 2 distinct screen but i spend more time usually on the channel screen (specially with band songs).
Thx for the tips about refining the splitting i try it now ;)
Edit:
I click split the whole song so the green and blue colors appear but when i right click i can't drag it like the left click do.
Edit2:
You have not added the flat notes why?
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jimhenry
Posts: 1899

Post by jimhenry »

Bravo on custom splits! :D

Could the custom split assignments be saved so that if you switch to non-custom and then back to custom, the previously set custom assignments are still there?

Could finger hints be integrated with custom split so that the hand assigned to a note by a finger hint also becomes the hand in the custom split?
Nicholas wrote:
kiwi wrote:Just a thing is it possible to split at another point of the song?
To keep it easy, the big tool is just "whole song". After that, you can right-click-drag to refine.

So whole-song split where it'll give you the most correct notes, and then go through a page at a time (Left Arrow and Right Arrow scroll nice and smoothly!) and use the line-drawing tool to fix small mistakes.
How about a "Split Song From Here" in addition to "Split Whole Song"?

I'd be OK with only having "Split From Here" because you just position the screen at the start to get "Split Whole Song". I rather like the idea that you do a split at the start, and then scroll through and adjust the split from where you are to the end if necessary.

I understand why you only split one track at a time but it would be nice if you could split all played by me tracks together. If you have a poorly split set of tracks, like some that just arbitrarily split the piano to allow different ranges to be balanced on output, it would be easier if you could see all the notes together when splitting.
Jim Henry
Author of the Miditzer, a free virtual theatre pipe organ
http://www.Miditzer.org/
kiwi
Synthesia Donor
Posts: 1180

Post by kiwi »

Ah ok the right click works like a charm after i have watched the tiny videos my bad :p
Birdman87
Posts: 61

Post by Birdman87 »

Well i must say, the hand splitting feature looks amazing, way better than i expected, great job!

How is the data for the hand splitting saved? like for example if i reinstall windows, will i need all the save data from the data folder to not lose all my track splitting?

Will the option to save the track splitting in the actual midi be available in the future? So in case we lose the synthesia save the actual midi is split.

Would it be possible to integrate the semitransparent dark circle behind the note names at least in the synthesiaconfig.exe side for those of us who have trouble with eye strain?

Also a little suggestion, when i click the Hands, Colors, and Instruments, wouldn't it be better for it to just show in the bottom side and not switch screens? This might suck when there are lots of instruments cause you have to scroll down to see them all, but for the majority of the songs it would be way more convenient and ergonomic just to have the two hands tracks pop down there.
kiwi
Synthesia Donor
Posts: 1180

Post by kiwi »

Hi, found 2 tiny translation errors.
1/
Hands,colors, &instrument is not translated in french:
"Mains, couleurs & instruments" is the translation.

2/
"L & R" on custom track splitting for "left & right" would be in french "G & D" for "gauche & droite"

3/ I haven't see the "Do ré mi fa sol la si do" notation in the playscreen area. (i mean in the button labeled La on the gameplay screen)

Others than this no bug discovered :)
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

kiwi wrote:You have not added the flat notes why?
That is still in the experimental stages. I'm not 100% sure about that look yet. All the benefits are really cool though. It might still make it into 10. We'll see. :D
jimhenry wrote:Could the custom split assignments be saved so that if you switch to non-custom and then back to custom, the previously set custom assignments are still there?
Hmm. I can definitely see the use cases for it. And I can definitely see how it might break user expectations if it didn't do that. But from a technology standpoint... that's more work.

Initially my thinking was that there's a single, canonical "correct" hand assignment for a given piece... but with all the utility brought by the background and discard assignments, you could use that stuff for all sorts of interesting behavior. (Say, background'ing all but the top note in chords to make it easier to play while still hearing the whole thing -- sort of like Easy mode in Guitar Hero.)

I'll think about how this might be implemented under the hood. It's definitely the right answer.
jimhenry wrote:Could finger hints be integrated with custom split so that the hand assigned to a note by a finger hint also becomes the hand in the custom split?
My next step on this front was going to be highlighting (in flashing, bold, red, etc.) finger hints that were contrary to the hand assignments. Say, if you tried to set a right-hand note to L3, the L3 would look all angry to let you know you most-likely just made a mistake. Even going so far as to only show the assigned hand in the finger hint interface, when picking the finger. (We can enforce that kind of rigidity now that there is a tool built-in to correct hand assignments in bad MIDI files.)

I hadn't considered using that information in reverse. I suppose from a historical standpoint, there are a lot of users that have finger-assigned songs already while hand-assignments are new. Going forward though, I wonder which order will be more typical: assigning hands first or fingers first?
jimhenry wrote:I'd be OK with only having "Split From Here" because you just position the screen at the start to get "Split Whole Song"...
Sold! A graceful solution. I love it and it's absolutely trivial (like one line of code plus a language update for the button text) to change it to the new behavior. That'll be in the next preview.
Birdman87 wrote:How is the data for the hand splitting saved? like for example if i reinstall windows, will i need all the save data from the data folder to not lose all my track splitting?
Yes, for now it's in [Synthesia data folder]/songInfo.xml
Birdman87 wrote:Will the option to save the track splitting in the actual midi be available in the future?
Synthesia solemnly promises never to modify your MIDI files, ever. :D Instead, when Synthesia 10 launches (soon!), the very next task on my list is to include hand assignment extraction in the metadata editor. So carrying hand-split data around will be exactly the same as finger hints, nicer titles, section names, and everything else. You'll just carry one extra .synthesia file around.
Birdman87 wrote:Would it be possible to integrate the semitransparent dark circle behind the note names...
A better solution is still coming in 10.1! Although... if it's a health thing, adding an advanced option like you suggested would only take a few minutes. I'll try to do that for the next preview.
Birdman87 wrote:... when i click the Hands, Colors, and Instruments, wouldn't it be better for it to just show in the bottom side and not switch screens?
You have predicted the future! ;) (I even mentioned the same a few posts ago.) Synthesia 12 is going to be changing the first screen quite a bit, which will make combining the two even easier.
kiwi wrote:... found 2 tiny translation errors.
Any new language introduced in dev previews is never translated until the final release. (Engaging the services of the professional translation company comes with some overhead, so the more you can have them do at once, the better.) Also: fewer steps required to make development previews means you guys get more development previews. :lol:

Regarding the L/R being shown as G/D, I had actually written some code to grab the first letter from that language's "Left" and "Right" text... but it turns out it's a little tricky to know that the first letter is actually the first grapheme cluster. (Unicode is weird.)

I might just add dedicated language strings for "L" and "R" with some comments for the translators that "This is a one letter abbreviation meaning Left hand" or something. Probably the safest way to do it.
kiwi wrote:I haven't see the "Do ré mi fa sol la si do" notation in the playscreen area.
Did you mean the "Fixed-Do Note Names" and "Movable-Do Note Names" choices? Or are you talking about being able to translate those so the regional names are used? That's still going to happen in the next translation pass just before 10 goes out the door.
kiwi
Synthesia Donor
Posts: 1180

Post by kiwi »

Thx Nicholas for all the answers.
Yes i was speaking about movable & fixed do not names (i don't know what is meaning by movable or fixed and i know my keys so i only use the finger displaying but for others French "Do,ré,mi,fa,sol,la,si,do" is the current names for notes.
It's a great preview i enjoying to learn with it atm :D
Birdman87
Posts: 61

Post by Birdman87 »

Birdman87 wrote:A better solution is still coming in 10.1! Although... if it's a health thing, adding an advanced option like you suggested would only take a few minutes. I'll try to do that for the next preview.
Omg thank you so much for this, you have no idea how much it helps!

And thank you for all your hard work, this is proving to be quite an amazing piece of software, maybe even something composers might use in the future with all the potential it has.
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

kiwi wrote:i don't know what is meaning by movable or fixed...
In Fixed-Do, the C pitch is always "Do". It doesn't matter what key you're in.

In Movable-Do, the root note of your key is always "Do". So in F Major, the F pitch is "Do". In Bb Major, it's Bb that's "Do".
kiwi
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Posts: 1180

Post by kiwi »

Found a bug:
When i click on autocolor all the tracks become hidden color (the gray one)

Thx for the movable & fixe notes name explanation.
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

Hmm, every single one? Normally the new "Auto Color" button is supposed to do what clicking on one of the "Simple" buttons did previously: change left to blue, right to green, and background to hidden. If it's hiding ALL of them, then something is wrong. I'll take a look.
kiwi
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Posts: 1180

Post by kiwi »

Ah i understand it hide all the background by default but when i open a midi file for the first time with many tracks all is set to background by default so i always need to make the job for each track maybe auto color for all the track and just the old show or hide button we 'll be more convenient.

Edit found a little things too: the fingering is not perfeclty centered on the keyboard dots,i mean numbers are slightly at the top.
Here's ascreenshot:
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jimhenry
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Post by jimhenry »

Nicholas wrote:
jimhenry wrote:Could finger hints be integrated with custom split so that the hand assigned to a note by a finger hint also becomes the hand in the custom split?
My next step on this front was going to be highlighting (in flashing, bold, red, etc.) finger hints that were contrary to the hand assignments. Say, if you tried to set a right-hand note to L3, the L3 would look all angry to let you know you most-likely just made a mistake. Even going so far as to only show the assigned hand in the finger hint interface, when picking the finger. (We can enforce that kind of rigidity now that there is a tool built-in to correct hand assignments in bad MIDI files.)

I hadn't considered using that information in reverse. I suppose from a historical standpoint, there are a lot of users that have finger-assigned songs already while hand-assignments are new. Going forward though, I wonder which order will be more typical: assigning hands first or fingers first?
Even if there is a "more typical" work flow, I think there will be plenty of use of both. Keeping hand assignments and finger hints synchronized seems like a much better job for a computer than a person. I would allow finger hint hands to trump custom hand assignments. If a finger hint assigns a note to the right hand, you wouldn't be able to change that with the custom hand split. You'd have to change the finger hint.

It would be nice to show the finger hints on the custom splitting screen and even to allow finger hints to be assigned on the custom splitting screen (in addition to the play screen).
Jim Henry
Author of the Miditzer, a free virtual theatre pipe organ
http://www.Miditzer.org/
PHIDIAS
Posts: 136

Post by PHIDIAS »

NICHOLAS!!!
ARE YOU SURE TO HAVE A "HALF CHINESE HALF ENGLISH" SYNTHESIA ???
i am worry about it. :shock:
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PHIDIAS
Posts: 136

Post by PHIDIAS »

also,the theme has some latin words.what's that mean?
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