Synthesia 11

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Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

It'll probably be closer to the 5th or 6th steps. That's when new sheet music elements will be added. Step 3 is more about making under-the-hood changes so that steps 5 and 6 are possible.
revilo2
Posts: 135

Post by revilo2 »

Too Bad...

I tought it was for step 4 but hoped it could be for step 3...

:(
Banditbat
Posts: 1

Post by Banditbat »

Hey there! I've had this feature idea racked in the back of my head for a long time now, and it should improve QoL in Synthesia considerably. So basically, my issue currently is that whenever I go through and add finger hints to all of my songs I'm currently learning, and end up updating, reinstalling, or whatnot, they all disappear :cry:

Now, my idea is, perhaps there could be a system set up where finger hints could be tied to your online Synthesia profile? Then whenever you add your profile to a new Synthesia install, all of the finger hints you set up are automatically reiterated to located songs.

Further in this venue, I've also run into many songs where the left + right hand are not separated. I think it would benefit QoL greatly to be able to split them within Synthesia.

Anyways, thank you so much for your hard work and dedication to this amazing software! :D
BryanS
Posts: 1

Post by BryanS »

I use Synthesia MetadataEditor to save fingering on multiple files and use dropbox to share the playlist file between all devices. Is that the kind of setup you are thinking?
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

Yep, I have good news for both of those. :D

In Synthesia 10, we added an easy-to-use tool that lets you split parts.

And, the Metadata Editor lets you export both finger hints and hand splitting for later use or sharing.
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

Progress Update!

Sheesh, I knew that Synthesia was missing some major features in its sheet music, but now that I've been digging into Behind Bars, I've already discovered maybe three dozen more subtly-wrong practices on top of that in just the first chapter I've studied! These things cannot be unseen and now I am physically repulsed whenever I look at Synthesia's current sheet. :lol:

It's bad enough that I feel like I owe everyone an apology. It's barely music. Some crude, caveman scrawl approximation to it, at best.

We'll get these things fixed. It's going to be an even more dramatic improvement than I realized. Most of these are easy; I just didn't know they were a problem in the first place.
revilo2
Posts: 135

Post by revilo2 »

Is "keeping right hand on the treble key and left hand on the bass key", one of these features ?

I think that it's really the most disturbing issue in the actual sheet...
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

That one counts as a major feature that I knew was missing. Yes, that will get fixed. MusicXML fixes it explicitly, but even for MIDI-generated sheet the situation will be better.

The solution is actually to remove the "treble" and "bass" limitations from the staffs. Adding support for 8va/8vb, similar clefs (say, two G Clef staffs if the hands are close together), and mid-measure clef changes (for wild swings in which octave you're playing). Instead of a "treble" staff, it's more like a "top" staff or "right hand" staff. The book I mentioned has an entire section on the rules for laying out keyboard music for performances between two staffs and I'm hoping to incorporate as much of that info as possible.
revilo2
Posts: 135

Post by revilo2 »

Thanks a lot Nicholas,

I did not understand everything (i'm french) but can''t wait to see on synthesia the sheet as i see it on musescore, even on a sigle line.

(I'm just talking about clef staffs / hands...)

Is it sheduled on the next preview ?
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

revilo2 wrote:Is it scheduled on the next preview ?
The more requirements I gather, the more it looks like things won't be as neatly segmented as I laid out in the top post. I was hoping the next (3rd) preview was going to just be an under-the-hood technology change, but a number of the more subtle improvements might necessarily come along for the ride.

I'm still expecting the majority of the improvements to arrive in the 6th preview, but now it's looking like things will be added in a little more scattered fashion along the way.


While I'm here, it's also worth mentioning that the interim bug-fix release that was planned for tablets is also going to be released on the desktop, too. Plenty of fixes have accumulated, so Synthesia 10.3 will contain everything you guys have seen to date (and a bunch of tablet fixes) and 11 will be purely sheet music work. That has been wrapping up for a few weeks now (progressing in tandem with sheet music work) and should be posted soon.
rennzen
Posts: 14

Post by rennzen »

Can't wait for 11 :)
sage789
Posts: 7

Post by sage789 »

I am really enjoying using the Synthesia software. Thanks for a great program!
I am mainly using it to learn to read sheet music while learning new songs, so I am especially excited about the development of version 11. I am hoping that it will enable full-screen sheet music (hiding the keyboard) and hopefully allowing the finger notation to show on the sheet music as an option (in addition to the current way it shows on the falling notes keyboard view). I am using it on my macbook air and Yamaha keyboard.
Any update on when 11 will be available?
I would be happy to "beta test" as well!
Thanks and happy holidays.
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

Both of those (full screen sheet and finger notation shown on sheet) are planned for Synthesia 11.

No time estimate yet. Keep an eye on this section of the forum for development previews and updates. :D
KaleidonKep99
Posts: 58

Post by KaleidonKep99 »

Will you bring back the old note textures?
There's people who still prefers the bulgy and old-looking notes over the flat ones! :lol: :lol:
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

Maybe some day. Now that we're on modern OpenGL, we can use a shader to draw notes with highlights/shadows in a single pass instead of requiring multi-texturing or multiple quads.

The original reason for the removal was efficiency. But with the new platform capabilities, we can have our cake and eat it too. Synthesia 11 has some technology requirements that, once added, will make note graphics pretty trivial to add. (Today the engine only allows a single shader for ALL drawing; the 11 release is going to add variable shaders, which means notes could get their own.)

The way a single pass could work is as follows: instead of using the color channels in the texture for R,G,B (which many times have all three identical to make it a white texture that can be multiplied with the note's actual color), we pretend the channels actually represent "value", "highlight", and "shadow" instead. Value gets multiplied with the note's actual color and highlight/shadow get layered on afterward.

Hopefully the shader will end up somewhere nearly as simple as "gl_FragColor = tex.R * noteColor - tex.G + tex.B;"

At the same time: I'm excited to try experimenting with rounded corners in the shader, too. So instead of rendering three quads per note (top rounded corners, middle, and bottom rounded corners) it will only be one quad and we can expose a slider to control the rounding radius. People that have been asking for square notes will finally be able to have them just by dialing the slider all the way down.

All told, old-style textured notes were 12 triangles each (2 layers x 3 quads x 2 triangles per quad). Once all of the above is said and done, it will only be 2. You can probably already imagine the kind of performance boost you'll see for Black MIDIs. ;)
KaleidonKep99
Posts: 58

Post by KaleidonKep99 »

I thought you just applied a TGA texture to the note (Which is supposed to only use two triangles, or am I wrong?).

Also, about Black MIDIs support... We noticed you added some sort of "note count cap" to the program... Was it intentional? :o
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

If it was just a single quad (two triangles), then tall notes would have different shaped rounded corners than short notes. The end-caps would be stretched/skewed. Some would look circular but others would look more elliptical. But all of my end-caps need to be beautiful, so they're drawn in three pieces! :lol: (Or two if the note is so short that there isn't any need for the middle section.) Historically there was a separate shadow layer drawn underneath in another three parts, too. That has been gone for a while now.

The note cap was (unfortunately) intentional. Switching over to the dynamic vertex buffer scheme (in Modern OpenGL) that the iPad has used since 2012, there was already a hard limit on the number of triangles per frame (for memory capacity and GPU bandwidth reasons). What this meant for Black MIDI songs was that the limit was hit while drawing notes, so any drawing that went on afterward (i.e., the UI) was simply cut off. So the UI would flicker in and out as the song got more or less intense. That was awful, so I found the number when flickering started to happen and just said "only allow drawing that many notes". I think it's 2600 or so.

Here's the relevant line from readme.html:
10.3 change log wrote:
  • Change: Songs with more than 2600 notes on the screen simultaneously will no longer cause the UI to flicker and misbehave.
(The video creator has a much higher limit because it doesn't need to work in real-time, so neither process memory usage or GPU memory bandwidth play a factor. You participated in that thread, too, but were talking about polyphony while the others around you were talking about note limit. :lol: )

This is even further out, but there is still one giant efficiency improvement left to be made but it's going to take rearchitecting a lot of the graphics code: up-front static vertex buffers instead of rebuilding every polygon every frame. Once that's complete the note limit will be gone, Synthesia will be performing maybe 1/100th as much work per frame, virtually nothing will have to be sent to the GPU each frame, and things should approach or surpass the rendering speed of PFA. Again, that refactoring is a big one and won't take place until after Synthesia 11.
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

sheet.png
sheet.png (8.79 KiB) Viewed 46252 times
We're gettin' there. :lol:

For as silly as it looks, there is a lot happening that is actually correct. This is using the new music font and rendering to a single texture. I just can't help but share the ridiculous first-visible-results (like the initial buggy iPad results).
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

Now we're cookin' with gas! :D
beams.png
beams.png (7.74 KiB) Viewed 46429 times
draco2023a
Posts: 27

Post by draco2023a »

Wow...to the untrained eye it would seem like you still have a ways to go, but I am guessing you are writing the engraving engine from scratch and that there is a lot of work.
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