Auto Difficulty set (BPM based)

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SaFteiNZz
Posts: 3

Post by SaFteiNZz »

:arrow: As title says.

I play and have lots of pieces downloaded from the internet and i would love to sort all of them all, I know i can set difficulty myself, but, when you have over 100 pieces and growing is kinda difficult. Would be cool to have an auto-difficulty set function for the songs.

Thanks for this awesome software and your work on it!
regards.
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

That's an interesting idea. I'm curious how well difficulty correlates with song speed. (I could imagine a very simple piece that happened to be fast, and an incredibly difficult one that happened to be slow.) In any event, just being able to sort the list by tempo is valuable, even if it's not a perfect fit with difficulty.

That said, this does get a little trickier. MIDI songs may contain several (or many) tempo changes throughout the course of the song. Should the average tempo be used? The fastest encountered tempo? The tempo that is present the longest?
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jimhenry
Posts: 1899

Post by jimhenry »

I think you would need to do some sort of analysis of notes per second to estimate difficulty. BPM alone isn't that informative because 120 bpm of predominantly quarter notes is the same as 60 bpm of predominantly eighth notes. But so many other things affect difficulty I find it hard to believe that anything as simple as average/maximum notes/unit time would be generally useful as a metric of difficulty. It wouldn't be much of a challenge to write a series of pieces consisting of nothing but quarter notes at 60 bpm that spanned the gamut from very easy to demonically difficult. Making these pieces musically interesting and satisfying wouldn't be so easy but that's not the point.
Jim Henry
Author of the Miditzer, a free virtual theatre pipe organ
http://www.Miditzer.org/
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