Prestokeys

[Neomi Bensch]

I've been using MuseScore to practice reading music for the past couple of weeks. The method (for the classical guitar) I'm following, provides duets that you're supposed to play with your teacher, in order to make the intial lessons, which are inevitably simple and boring, a little more interesting and I've MuseScore to be a very useful tool for practice. It can be used to play back the music, to give you an idea of what it's supposed to sound like, it can mute the instrument you're playing and it has a metronome and lead-in feature, which is more or less all you need.

> One concern was that the cursor and note-highlighting during playback, might interfere with learning to count properly, so I looked into what it would take to disable it. As it might be useful to others, this is a pull request implementing the necessary changes to make highlighting optional.

> I'm not very familiar with MuseScore's source, or Qt development, so, in order to minimize the possibility of introducing bugs, or style violations, I based my implementation on the "pan score during playback" option, which seems related, as it's a visual playback aid. I also ran the result through valgrind, to make sure I haven't introduced any memory-related bugs (which revealed what looks like an unrelated uninitialized value bug, which I'll report separately, as well as a few other issues, which look like they're inside Qt or Freetype code).

>My changes seem to do what they're supposed to, without breaking anything, but if you choose to adopt the PR, please inspect them for unwanted side-effects in other functionality, that I might have missed (since I'm new to MuseScore and have only used a small subset of its features).

> For the sake of completeness, I've also added an icon. It's quite uninspired, but was the only thing I could come up with to get the point across. Feel free to change it (or anything else) as needed.

> Hello, and welcome! I'm not sure I totally understand the value of not having the cursor, but I'm not opposed to providing this is a convincing case can be made for the value of it. Would you still want it to turn the page automatically? What if it still highlighted the notes by coloring them but didn't actually draw the cursor rectangle? Seems worth discussing on the forums first to see if there are others with similar requests. There are other requests having to do with how we present the score during playback, such as people who want the score to move continuously. Might be nice to simply combine all of these different behaviors into a single control that has multiple values.

> Hi and thanks for the quick reply. I should have been a little more specific about the reasoning behind the PR.

> As I've mentioned, I've been using MuseScore to practice on the classical guitar, which I've been playing for some time, but using tablature, so that I'm a complete novice with respect to reading musical notation. I started using MuseScore, to substitute for a second guitar, as the lessons were in the form of duets, but quickly found out it can substitute for a lectern, sheet music and everything else one needs to practice.

> After using it for a couple of weeks, I started noticing that I might often be depending on the cursor showing me where and when to play and counting for me. For instance I might lose count and use the cursor to carry on, or I might subconciously just look at the cursor and forget to count altogether. As you might suspect, none of these observations were very exact, as it's hard to be sure of what you're doing, when you're concetrating hard on something you're not very good at. The concern though, was that the cursor might interfere with rhythmic training over the long run, by making me dependent on such an aid for proper timing, making my counting/timing less precise, slowing down progress, or something along these lines.

> So, to answer your questions, it's hard to know what exactly I'd need to turn off, if anything at all. I can't really know whether the cursor will hinder or help learning to read music and, after turning it off, I don't notice any "withdrawal symptoms" although I haven't been using it for long enough to depend on it. The idea was that, since the tried and true method of music training doesn't include a cursor, or highlighted notes, the safest bet would be to turn such aids off.

> Turning the page automatically is more a matter of convenience and I can't see how it could interfere with the learning process. I suppose turning the page yourself might be a necessary skill during live performances and having such an aid might make you lazier in practicing it, but this is far from being a concern for me and besides, panning is selectable.

> In the end, if noone has requested this feature until now (and I could find anything in the forums), perhaps I'm just being unduly concerned and it's not very useful in general. I'd be happy to keep my own patched version of MuseScore in such a case (which I'd have to do for a long time anyway, until the new version containing the feature got packaged for Debian stable).

> I have a totally different reason for not wanting a cursor... using MuseScore with an e-ink display!

> The ONYX BOOX MAX 2 is an almost A4 sized e-ink tablet which runs Android 6. It really is Android (not a crippled OEM version that ties you in to a Kindle-like store, cough GVIDO cough) so you can install any Android application. Unlike most e-readers, it even has audio-out and (get this!) HDMI-in (!?!?!) so you can use it as a display for any device that outputs HDMI (e.g. a second monitor for a laptop).

> I'm lucky enough to own a MAX 2, so naturally I installed MuseScore on it! The app runs fine (or as well as can be expected on an e-ink device) but during playback there is a noticeable lag between a note being sounded and the e-ink display being updated (i.e. the sound comes first). The cursor also jumps around because the e-ink display is not suited for continuous motion. The lag could be fixed by delaying the audio, but the motion problem requires disabling the cursor altogether.

> Interestingly, the MuseScore website works better than the app on MAX 2, because the website highlights the entire measure rather than a single note, which leads to my next suggestion:

> Perhaps having an option to highlight the measure would be a better solution than disabling the cursor altogether? Even for the OP's use-case of learning to read music, highlighting the measure helps you to see roughly where you are (so you don't get lost) without giving the game away entirely. (I can see this being useful if MuseScore ever gets a "play along" mode that listens to you perform the piece yourself and turns pages for you; you'd want to know that MuseScore has some idea where you are in the score, without the distraction of a moving cursor).

Hello, yesterday I asked about such an option here : -944142 from a similar concern about develloping good sight-reading habits. The idea of having the possibility of high-lighting the entire measure (or even with an option choice going from one up to the 4 measures to come) rather than only the single note actually being played seems a good compromise to me, in order to be assited in a "read before you play" habit, but still be shown where about you are in the score.

Actually if i devellop this idea a bit further the highlight could concern only the forthcoming measure (s) rather than what's being played.

I'd love to see that working option available in musescore, ideally coupled with an inbuilt random melody generator like this one : -1055.appspot.com/ (Many thanks to lasconic by the way !! )

Hi Vector,

I submited this idea to the band in a box devellopers a month later. And got a reply saying they would definitely study this display option, but nothing since then ( I'm going to re-send a message to them when i'm finished with this one ).

I would be ready to pay if someone produced a software allowing to work in the manner i described above. But so far i haven't found it anywhere. The closest i've come across is : www.prestokeys.com , great adjustability but still doesn't allow the display option i'm looking for... let's spread the idea though... happy new year by the way !

This could be fairly simple to implement?

In Edit/Preferences/Advanced

There are a host of settings and colour swatches the user can change.

If the cursor colour was made available to the user and then simply set the Alpha to 0 when I want it invisible?

I could live with that

Hi expert, I need your help!

I just bought Boox Max3 Padmu, I'm trying to use Musescore App on this device, however it doesn't allow me sign in with facebook, there is always errors. I tryed to sign up with Google, and even subscribed pro version, but it doesn't show any content.

Hello Sergios, any chances this becomes possible soon ? I've seen that Spire42 replied to you on github but then nothing since march... Is the work you made on the code usable by a non computer-skilled person like me meanwhile ?

Hello :^)

Spire42 said that he has a PR in the works that will take care of that issue and more so I closed my Pull Request. That means that it will not get merged into the master branch unless he decides to not complete his work, in which case I will reopen the PR.

There are posts throughout the boards asking for change of highlighter color, but of special interest is letting alpha become 0 so that the highlighter becomes invisible for the purposes of sight-reading aid or for whatever other purpose (notwithstanding invisibility, alpha-value is currently hard-coded, and it may be that certain monitor setups would benefit if it were user-definable).

Merely separating the highlighter from voice-1 color as a distinct advanced preference should do it. Sergios apparently had something going there but then closed his PR, yet Spire42 didn't actually implement anything later. I think Sergios' PR should be reopened. If no one else does it, I'll get into the code soon and send a PR having a separate attribute for highlighter color with the addition of an internal alpha-cap like he had for something like 220 or 200 or something to ensure non-opacity.

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