Staffpad: a new class of notation app • Hacker News Board

Re: Staffpad: a new class of notation app

#101

Post by shermanyo » Thu, Oct 08, 2015, 5:00 AM UTC

codeulike wrote: post #66

Omnus wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to explicitly enter 16th notes, you have to make it obvious to StaffPad that that's what you want, otherwise it can interpret the lines as 8th or 32nd notes, or a combination of those depending on where the notes fall in the measure. Again, for simple scores where the handwritten music is fairly obvious, it works fine. The key point is that the entry method slows down professional users, because you have…

OK, but ... have you tried it out? You seem to be assuming quite a lot about how well it can interpret input.

it looks like you'd add dashes for the tails, just like you would for a semiquaver on paper. one of the great things about this is that there's zero 'design' to sheet music, its essentially a spec. There's a lot of implied information that can be fed into the handwriting recognition, and it looks like it doesn't try to parse until you've moved onto the next bar, so can analyze the block against a very well defined domain. Vertical lines all represent a note (besides small ticks for sharps maybe), and the time signature narrows this down to only so many possible permutations of possibilities.

Re: Staffpad: a new class of notation app

#102

Post by rtkwe » Thu, Oct 08, 2015, 1:59 PM UTC

golergka wrote: post #99

rtkwe wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is the combination of note length and the actual note. Add in multiple notes played at once and you hit the 3 key limit of most consumer keyboards before most groups would be finished. Beyond that there's also just the difficulty of mapping between the keyboard and keys, how do you easily deal with the gaps in the black keys, there's enough keys to map one to one with most of a piano but keeping that in m…

Well, if you're even remotely serious about it, you'd rather buy a midi keyboard rather then using a qwerty one.

Sure, but that's not what the parent I was responding to was suggesting. gbc0 was specifically talking about using a 104 key keyboard to write out music, so I addressed that option and it's pitfalls. Other people have addressed issues with the midi keyboard option though.

I can't really address that very well because it's beyond my experience, but I'll summarize what I've seen. The main gripes seem to be it's still a little slow to enter notes because you have to specify the note length each time you want to change it and that it takes up a lot of space compared to something like this where you can just write it out when it may or may not be your instrument.

Re: Staffpad: a new class of notation app

#103

Post by 6stringmerc » Fri, Oct 09, 2015, 8:50 PM UTC

6stringmerc wrote: post #63

This looks great! ...but will it do Guitar Tab? Thousands of passionate staff-illiterate-to-barely-competent songwriting guitarists would probably like to know. Edit: Went ahead and emailed through their contact form, I'm eager to find out what they say.

Got the email back: Nope, no Guitar Tab support in the application, nor is it ever planned.

"Other programs already do that well," according to the response.

Re: Staffpad: a new class of notation app

#104

Post by mbubb » Wed, Oct 14, 2015, 2:10 AM UTC

nanofortnight wrote: post #53

mbubb wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fascinating - wonder if this is similar to how a Korean phoneme or an ideogram is assembled while typing.

Similar to how Chinese characters are written: with a prescribed stroke order learnt at school.

No - I understand that part - I meant the transformation of the syllable as it is assembled. It changes shape in a similar way.