10.8 preview r5619, r5621 - Sheet Music Improvements

[Nicholas]

SYNTHESIA 10.8.5619
Download from the pink box above.





CHANGES SINCE r5567

• Full-screen sheet can now be freely dragged and is generally much nicer to use.
• A first-note timing bar has been added to the sheet area that shows when the song will begin.
• Sheet music zoom controls are now under the gear menu.
• Fixed several downstem-related sheet music rendering glitches.
• Adjust "Keyboard.MiddleCOctave" to name Middle C something besides C3.
• Disable "FreePlay.ShowChordName" to hide chord names in Free Play.
• Large songs should load much (~10x) faster.
• Fixed a few crashes.

This finally smooths out the "few more rough edges" I'd mentioned in Mar-2019's Full-screen Notation update. A few other things got in the way before I had a chance to revisit it, but it finally feels good.

I actually forgot to mention in the video that the sheet music controls are under the gear menu (instead of only sliding out when the song is paused). I've been living with that change for long enough that I barely mentioned it in passing.

Anyway, hopefully the stuff in the video looks... normal. Almost, uninteresting. The way you move around in the sheet music is moving from a non-standard, warty system over to the way every single app works now, so it should look/feel very natural.

The build was actually made with 10.7 versioning (and not 10.8). If we don't find any bugs, this will become the 10.7.1 build that the iPad uses to allow unlock keys in addition to in-app purchases.

Next-up: absolute bare-essential MusicXML parsing (just scraping them for MIDI events with no additional sheet music features yet). It'll be the first step into a larger world.

[Nicholas]

SYNTHESIA 10.8.5621
Download from the pink box above.

• The song list should be as fast as it used to be in Synthesia 10.2 (instead of 100x slower).
• The frame rate should remain smooth, even with the built-in synth disabled on Windows 10 version 2004 and later.

Thanks for your help lucalucky and Bavi_H!

(Have I said lately how much I still like my decision to invest a bunch of time into the automated system that lets me build and push a development preview--or even official release!--in a single button click? Being able to respond to these kinds of bugs with a quick turn-around feels awesome. And because it's so easy to do now, I am incentivized to get fixes into your hands as soon as they're available.)

[Smiley]

The latest dev version downloaded is 10.7.5621 for win; NOT 10.8.56?? - - what am I missing...

[Nicholas]

Check the second-to-last paragraph in the top post.

(In the end, all that matters is that last four digit number. That's the "commit count" number, which is always monotonically increasing. The other numbers in front of it are more or less just marketing.)