Feedback and Suggestions

Synthesia is a living project. You can help by sharing your ideas.
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icuurd12b42
Posts: 48

Post by icuurd12b42 »

Here another little thing that could be improved.

If you could have a refresh button in the song list that would save us a lost of quit and restart when we add songs in our folder. Right now the app does not know I added songs.

Specific to windows, you can monitor for file changes in folders too. but really a refresh would be good enough imho
Nicholas
Posts: 13132

Post by Nicholas »

icuurd12b42 wrote: 01-18-22 12:59 pmI still wonder about that 500 ms delay, why would the default have such a delay, would you not want the sound to play the moment you want it to? I guess for game background music in the 90's and early 2000 it would be useful cpu wise and not noticeable? But for playing the keyboard, it's a weird value... Assuming the MS Synth has the same weird default setting, I wonder where that setting be in windows...
If Windows exposes their buffer size someplace (the registry, maybe?) then I've never heard of it. It seems to be slowly getting worse with each version of Windows. Back in the Windows XP days, it was relatively snappy. Since then, you could count on another 10-30ms being added by each major OS version. This was the motivation for adding the built-in synth in the first place.

While there are good reasons to increase a buffer size (especially in a non-interactive context like playing background music during a videogame), if I had to guess, it's simply sloppy programming and the general disorder that comes from stacking layers upon layers of abstraction in the code. Each new generation of employees would rather build something "clean" on top of the old stuff than use it directly, so you end up with more slop.

This is the reason that the "new" WinRT MIDI layer that was released with Windows 10 remains buggy to this day. The old Win32 interface fell out of favor and they wanted a shiny new C# API that... still doesn't work at all.
icuurd12b42 wrote: 01-18-22 2:26 pmIf you could have a refresh button in the song list that would save us a lost of quit and restart when we add songs in our folder. Right now the app does not know I added songs.
iPad and Android already refresh whenever you return to the app from the background. So it's just PC/Mac that are missing this. And I'd like to use the "monitor the filesystem" hooks to do it right so things show up automatically and immediately.

For reference, "Live library rescanning (finally)" is currently on line 263 of the list, which--all things considered--is relatively soon. :lol:
icuurd12b42
Posts: 48

Post by icuurd12b42 »

Another thing I just realized today trying to follow along online interactive sheet music on musescore.com is how I would wish for the music sheet to be available in the Free Play mode so that I can see the note I'm playing appear on the sheet music.
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jimhenry
Posts: 1899

Post by jimhenry »

What would the note duration be if the note appeared as you played it?
Jim Henry
Author of the Miditzer, a free virtual theatre pipe organ
http://www.Miditzer.org/
icuurd12b42
Posts: 48

Post by icuurd12b42 »

I just want an indicator that I'm pressing the right notes, the keys currently pressed. Not if I'm playing the right melody...
Nicholas
Posts: 13132

Post by Nicholas »

I was able to get a few of the suggestions from the first page (re: multiple instruments in Free Play) into the latest 10.9 dev preview.
Doughber
Posts: 2

Post by Doughber »

I would like to sugest if in settings a shortuct key can be assigned to say sustain to work in Synthesia. My keyboard doesn't allow for a sustain pedal connection. So I would like to press a key on my keyboard lets say that would make sustain work. Becuase I have a usb foot pedal that I can assign keyboard key to it. Or I suppose this would be something under the virtual keyboard settings I would think. where you can set keyboard keys to each note.
Nicholas
Posts: 13132

Post by Nicholas »

I've never used it, but something like VMPK should be able to solve this problem. If you install a virtual MIDI driver (like LoopBe1 or loopMIDI), you could send VMPK's MIDI messages to Synthesia. And it this Reddit post mentions that they let you map keyboard keys to the various pedals.
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