10.6.5134 - Full-Screen Notation

Post by **Nicholas** » 03-29-19 5:28 pm

SYNTHESIA 10.6.5134
Download from the pink box above.

: Hide the falling notes from the new display settings popup to show full-screen notation.; full-screen-sheet.png (331.05 KiB) Viewed 65100 times

Major New Stuff

Use the gear icon to toggle falling notes and sheet music. Turn falling notes off to have sheet music take over the whole screen.
Click on the sheet music to navigate through the song.
Ctrl-click sheet music to create bookmarks. (Or enter bookmark editing mode and left-click.)
Right-drag sheet music to create loops. (Or enter loop editing mode and left-drag.)
The macOS version now draws using Metal by default. Disable "Graphics.Metal" to switch back to OpenGL. (There is still a little bit of Metal cleanup going on. The falling notes still shimmer a little.)

: Right-click-drag to make loops just like in the timeline.; drag-sheet-loop.png (56.65 KiB) Viewed 65100 times

Fixes and the Rest

Double-clicking will now pause/resume from any mode.
Bluetooth devices should show up on Windows 10 again (with "Midi.UseWinRTMidi" enabled).
Updated the bookmark mode icon to look more like a bookmark and less like a map pin.
News intended for older versions should no longer appear after updating.
The song position should no longer jitter while rewinding or dragging near the beginning of a song.
Dragging the app between a Retina and non-Retina monitor should no longer cause oversize graphics.

Here we go! Synthesia 11 progress at last and three days sooner than promised.

(I wanted to avoid the "10.6 came out after an 11 preview" confusion, so I just called this one 10.6 for the time being despite it being Synthesia 11-proper features. All of this will be released in 10.6 anyway, so it works.)

Clicking and dragging on the sheet music is like my new favorite thing. It's really effortless to jump right where you want to go now. (I suppose this is less impressive with this being the most basic feature of every sheet music editing app in the history of the universe, but it's new to Synthesia so hopefully people will find it useful!)

To make the deadline, I left a few more rough edges than usual but the big features are there. There are a few interactions that will get smoother: the sheet music isn't great about knowing when rests occur, so clicking on one will usually give you a bookmark, loop, or jump the song to just before/after the rest. And navigating in the sheet area has a tendency to jump around if it's in the middle of the full-screen slide animation. I'll probably follow this preview up with another one with those things (and a dozen or so others) fixed. Then it's off to the "Portrait Mode / Small Screen Support" milestone immediately.

monkel · Post by **monkel** » 03-31-19 8:14 am

Sounds great overall, looking forward to giving it a spin!

electabots · Post by **electabots** » 03-31-19 8:15 pm

Hi Nicholas, there doesn’t happen to be a ios beta or testflight for this build is there?

Thanks

Post by **Nicholas** » 03-31-19 10:13 pm

Historically we've skipped iOS dev previews because of how much extra work Apple made it to add/maintain testers. I just checked and it looks like they finally fixed most of that in July of 2018. It will take some wrangling of our automatic build process to get iOS included, but it's something that might finally make sense to add. Thanks for asking and getting me to double-check! I hadn't heard about that change last year.

electabots · Post by **electabots** » 03-31-19 11:51 pm

Good deal! Makes me feel better breaking out of forum-lurker mode heh. No rush or anything, appreciate and love the work you do and the program. Been using it for years now, this recent dev update just got me really excited and I don’t have a reliable PC anymore.

Thanks

oc67 · Post by **oc67** » 04-11-19 3:19 pm

Hi,

thanks for your great job.

Just for information, with 10.6.5134 release, i need to reactivate licence number.

Best.

Post by **Nicholas** » 04-11-19 4:42 pm

See the bold text in the pink box at the top of this page!

(Development previews exist completely separately from official versions. So, as far as the development preview knows, you've never unlocked Synthesia before.)

miek · Post by **miek** » 04-13-19 5:16 pm

Hi, This is a great update. I am running it on Windows 7 and testing it with "The Entertainer". I am only doing the sheet music display with the keyboard at the bottom.

Clicking on the sheet to move the position is brilliant. When you click on the line below (on my screen, part of the second line is obscured because I am zoomed in) - it scrolls the sheet music up so that you can see it fully. That is nice. But is there a way of clicking back to the line above (fully hidden on my screen) or do you just have to use the left arrow key to move it back? I know you can click in the measure window above - for this, maybe it would be helpful if you could see line divisions - for example: if the sheet music shows four measures then in the measures window, the measure line would be a different colour indicating a new sheet music line like this... !|||! ||| and so on (! = one ccolour, |=another).

During playing, the scroll of the sheet music to the next line does not happen at the right time. Eg: I have the display zoomed in so that I can see seven measures on the first line - this also displays a bit of the top of the second line. As I play along and get to the 8th measure, the music does not scroll up until after I play the note. Because of the keyboard, I cannot see the low G that I have to play here. I can scroll the piano window down to reveal the note, but the main point is that sheet doesn't scroll until the notes are played.

The new cog icon is great because I can easily turn off the notes and have the sheet music. I wonder if the F5 "Toggle all notes hidden" is working properly. On mine, this is now putting a second line of sheet music on my display (partially obsured by the keyboard window as before, or just showing one line or sheet music. This second one does show the next note, now on the left like it used to be before the multiple lines revison.

I have the keyboard window open underneath the sheet music - I only use this once in a while to see which keys I'm supposed to be pressing. I like having the keyboard on but it does take up a bit too much of the screen. I can resize it, but if I were to make it smaller using the arrow icon that is at the top right of the keyboard, the whole keyboard moves down - therefore removing (at first, the octive (eg. C4), then the figer dots on the white keys - then a long way after this, the dots on the black keys. I was wondering if this could be scaled vertically so the black keys were not so big?

I think the loop funtions are really helpful too. Especially now with the 'click on the sheet music'.

Post by **Nicholas** » 04-15-19 3:46 pm

This is great feedback, thank you! Posts like yours are exactly the reason I like to release early development previews.

"Easily going backward a page" is one of those delightful problems that didn't exist before because everything was hard. Now it's the only thing that's hard, so it stands out! The further this comes along, the more I find myself wanting to treat the notation display as a sort document or even web page that I can just arbitrarily scroll through with my finger or mouse. As long as the active measure is still on the screen, I'm not sure why it needs to be at the top. This will come into play even stronger as we add support for portrait-orientation tablet screens, later in the 10.6 development cycle. At that point, it wouldn't be strange to have 4-6 lines on the screen at once. So, all the gears are turning in my head now for new interactions to make things even easier.

I really like the idea of showing a slightly different marker in the timeline to denote sheet music line breaks. That should be relatively straightforward to add. They would be toggled on whenever sheet music is visible. Let me add that to the list for the next preview, too!

F5 is working correctly. I combined the idea of falling notes shown/hidden and sheet music shown/hidden into a sort of compound "one, or the other, or both, or none" idea. You can hide everything by turning off the notation and the falling notes. But when falling notes are hidden, that's the signal to allow the sheet music take up the rest of the available space now. What we're really missing now is an equivalent show/hide shortcut for the sheet music. (Perhaps F2?)

Key labels and next-note helper dots falling off the bottom when the keyboard is shifted has been a long-standing problem that is only about to get more exacerbated as people want to free up more screen real-estate for more lines of sheet music. It's been on the to-do list forever, but maybe now is the right time to tackle it.

miek · Post by **miek** » 05-01-19 5:18 pm

I have noticed that sometimes the same note is appearing twice - once on the treble cleff and once on the base clef. On this music it is the B note.

This MIDI file has lots of channels. Most of the right hand uses two of them (they each have diffent voices - but mostly the notes are different from each other). When the two channels are switched on separately ( so that only one channel is playing) the sheet music will show just a single clef - one of the channels causes the treble clef to be shown, the other causes the bass clef to be shown. When they are both switched on together (both to the right hand), the sheet music draws both clefs and the 'B' notes are duplicated one above the other. When you press the 'B' the note nearest the bass clef lights up green - whereas the 'B' note above it and nearest the treble clef remains black. (They are the same note - not an octive apart)

There was previous posts about allocation of notes to right and left hand , but these are two different channels, both allocated to the right hand. And the same note is at the same measure in two places, it only seems to be the 'B' that does it.

I'm not sure how to post an image of this. I know it also happens on version 10.5.1.4900 as well.

Post by **Nicholas** » 05-01-19 7:33 pm

I'd be curious to see this in action. If you could, please either attach the MIDI file to a post here or you can just send it to support@synthesiagame.com and I'll be able to take a look. Thanks!

Tiothae · Post by **Tiothae** » 05-04-19 1:39 pm

I absolutely love the changes that you've put in with this development build, I can't get over how much better this is for notation. I've been trying to get better at sight reading and this is making a huge, huge difference.

There were two things which I was wondering about for how difficult they would be to implement, but it obviously depends on how useful you think they would be for people:

Option to hide the piano roll at the bottom of the screen altogether - I find myself sometimes using that as a crutch when I want to force myself to only use the notation (and without putting a piece of card over the bottom 1/3 of the screen!)
Option to colour-code the notes - I doubt this would be useful for people who are further along than I am, but it would be nice to know the recommended hand for a given note when only displaying the notation

Post by **Nicholas** » 05-04-19 2:21 pm

Thanks for the feedback!

For the first one, if you turn off "Falling Notes" from the new gear settings icon, that should switch things over to full-screen sheet music and hide the falling notes altogether. (It should look like the animation in the top post. Is it working differently for you?) You can even tuck the keyboard the rest of the way down: pause the song, then drag the little blue square at the right all the way down.

I do want to color-code the "active/matched" note heads that appear on the staff when you play a key, but for all the notes that belong to the song I think it might actually be Synthesia causing a bit of confusion. Ideally, piano sheet music is supposed to be notated so that each hand is always on a separate staff. (Right hand on the top line, left hand on the bottom, regardless of clef.) Synthesia doesn't get anywhere near this ideal today, but by the time Synthesia 11 is finished, it should be able to do that correctly 95% of the time. So, there won't be any need to use color to determine handedness; you'll know simply by which staff the note is on.

Tiothae · Post by **Tiothae** » 05-04-19 4:06 pm

Nicholas wrote:For the first one, if you turn off "Falling Notes" from the new gear settings icon, that should switch things over to full-screen sheet music and hide the falling notes altogether. (It should look like the animation in the top post. Is it working differently for you?) You can even tuck the keyboard the rest of the way down: pause the song, then drag the little blue square at the right all the way down.

I had done the first part, but I didn't know that I could tuck the keyboard down if I paused the song. I'd never noticed that drag icon before, oops! That's much better, but when I change to a new song or play again, it makes the top half of the piano along the button visible again. The falling notes stay off though, so that part's fine.

Nicholas wrote:I do want to color-code the "active/matched" note heads that appear on the staff when you play a key, but for all the notes that belong to the song I think it might actually be Synthesia causing a bit of confusion. Ideally, piano sheet music is supposed to be notated so that each hand is always on a separate staff. (Right hand on the top line, left hand on the bottom, regardless of clef.) Synthesia doesn't get anywhere near this ideal today, but by the time Synthesia 11 is finished, it should be able to do that correctly 95% of the time. So, there won't be any need to use color to determine handedness; you'll know simply by which staff the note is on.

Most of the time, the staff handles it without issue (at least for most of what I'm playing at the minute!), the only problem is when you're meant to cross yours hands over for a particular section (e.g. playing an arpeggio with your left hand, and during that, you need to play a lower note with your right hand, and then jump back again), like in the included track for Moonlight Sonata.

electabots · Post by **electabots** » 05-06-19 8:24 am

What I do with my sheet music is write my fingering notes with right hand above the note and left hand below, regardless of staff. I’d love to carry this over to Synthesia in the future.

Post by **Nicholas** » 05-06-19 4:25 pm

I haven't checked against Behind Bars, but that's generally the way I've always seen finger numbers drawn on a staff: with the right hand numbers at top and left hand numbers at below. I suspect that's the way I'll implement it.

Magic73 · Post by **Magic73** » 07-05-19 3:48 am

Hi Nicholas,

is development preview available only for PC users?
I'm using iOS, and if you want I may be a beta-tester.

Post by **Nicholas** » 07-05-19 5:19 am

Everyone but iOS.

Although, a few months ago I learned that Apple has made beta testing on iOS a lot more sensible than last I'd heard, so it's on the list to get into the automatic build process soon. (I have it on the list for two 10.6 previews from now.)

Magic73 · Post by **Magic73** » 07-05-19 7:02 am

On iOS you may use Testflight.. and add users to your tester list.

the test release, will be in a different channel than the one released for the store. The app will install even if you already have the "official" one installed.

I created a small guide about (pdf): https://www.magicstudio.eu/my/test_flight.pdf

RobertM · Post by **RobertM** » 07-05-19 7:45 am

Hi
Is it possible to download this patch 10.6.5134 for Windows, have been taking piano lessons, would love to put some of the songs to use for sheet music full screen.

Still an awesome program. Excellent work. Found it