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Show HN: iPad port of my sheet music app Etude
- jawngee 16y agoCool, but I can't make my own sheet music with it?
- jawngee 16y ago(I worked on Finale back in the mid 90's).
- dangrover 16y agoThere's a song converter that converts music to Etude's format from several others (Sibelius, MusicXML, Lilypond, etc). It's an internal tool now that just runs on the command line. But there will be an interface exposed in the coming months so that people can convert music for their own use and also publish to the store.
- redangstrom 16y agoBeautiful! Can I hook it up to any electric pianos?
- glhaynes 16y agoIs yours the app shown on Apple's new iPad commercial?
- alanthonyc 16y agoI've been anxiously awaiting the release of this app. I'm buying day one.
- dutchflyboy 16y agoLooks great! The only thing that bugged me was the position indicator, as it didn't have a very predictable motion. Sometimes it goes very fast, other times it just stops. I understand that it's impossible to make the speed constant, but at the moment it really doesn't look natural.
- dangrover 16y agoIt goes at the speed of the music, depending on how long notes are held. I've been experimenting with that animation...it does seem kinda uncanny valley somehow
- mcav 16y agoI noticed that too. I'm not sure if there's a better way to do it or not; as a piano player myself, it might seem more intuitive to me to have a visual indicator at each beat in the measure, and then just highlight each note (via color or something) as it's played. I think the reason it seems off is because it's so irregular, even though it does match with the music itself. Kudos though, Etude looks great.
- cpr 16y agoMaybe have a constant-speed thin vertical cursor along with (behind) the jerky highlight? That would help to smooth things out and get out of the "valley."
- manvsmachine 16y agoI'd suggest a combination of both mcav and cpr's suggestions. Highlight the notes themselves instead of the area around them. Drop the jumpy marker and replace it with a smoothly moving, constant speed vertical marker. It's a commonly recognized and understood element (used in pretty much any and every audio production / recording software). It also gives the viewer a better sense of the tempo. Remember, tempo can change drastically over the course of a song; the current marker doesn't demonstrate the difference between playing shorter notes at a slower tempo and longer notes at a faster tempo.
- 16y ago
- ique 16y agoCompletely unrelated but just found this and you might want to know, if you go to a style like http://etudeapp.com/music/style/9/ballad http://etudeapp.com/music/style/9/ballad and then click Home in the breadcrumbs, you go to /home which lands you on a 404 page. Also, do you have any plans to expand the music library?
- J3L2404 16y agoBeautiful app and very well put together presentation. As soon as you hit the page the video starts and demonstrates its functionality. Even the best writers fail to fully convey the feel of use, so why not cut to the chase? Congrats, I look forward to using it.
- grinich 16y agoWhy'd you choose to use vzaar.com? How much bandwidth does a showcase site like this take up on average?
- dangrover 16y agoI chose them because they had a nice looking player and I was in a hurry to get the site up. But they're pretty awful. They charge way too much for bandwidth and the <video> alternative they put in the page doesn't play on an iPhone/iPad. Support is kinda lame too. Once I find a decent generic flv player I'm moving the videos to my normal CDN.
- Derferman 16y agoMay I suggest Video for Everybody? http://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody http://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody
- tel 16y agoIt's sort of deeply ironic that the video doesn't play on iPads.
- dangrover 16y agoYeah, will fix once I'm off of vzarr.
- necubi 16y agoI'm very excited to try this! Sheet music reader seems like such an obvious application for the iPad. Now I just have to think about how much I trust my shaky stand with my $600 toy.
- pbz 16y agoWhat would be nice if there was some kind of foot activated gadget that would talk with the ipad. When pressed it would flip to the next sheet. This would eliminate the breaks when the player has to move the hand off the piano to flip to the next page.
- spohlenz 16y agoMaybe they could release a foot pedal iPhone app to go along with it?
- nandemo 16y agoLike this? http://airturn.com/ http://airturn.com/
- zweben 16y ago"A Bluetooth version of the AirTurn is currently under development for the Apple iPad, and is expected to be available towards the end of 2010." Nice. Hopefully the iPad device is a lot less than $200 though.
- nanotone 16y agoBravo! Seeing this app makes me want to get an iPad just to play around with it. Well, almost: As a fairly serious amateur pianist, I definitely appreciate that this could let me ditch my dusty bookshelf of heavy scores, turn pages for me, and keep track of my location on the page. But the real deal-breaker for me is that it doesn't look like I can annotate the music with fingerings and expressive marks. When first learning a piece I probably spend as much time scribbling on the score [in pencil!] as I do reading it with fingers. This would still be immensely useful for sight-reading though, where page-turns are a much bigger issue than fingering and expression. But it seems ironic to start out learning a piece with Etude, only to graduate back to paper later. All in all though, this is some really exciting technology. Nitpick: the built-in synthesizer seems to have a pretty lazy right foot. Pedagogically speaking it'd actually be better to drop the pedaling altogether rather than obscure the harmony -- make it a setting? Even better: make it respect pedaling marks in the score!
- dangrover 16y agoYeah, annotation is coming in 1.2. Keep having to cut features to get the thing out. Looking into improving the synth as well.
- Entlin 16y agoHave you considered automatic page turning by analyzing the microphone input? You would probably have to do 3 different position finding methods to gain enough stability. Like combining (1) FFT note pitch recognition with (2) some beat tracking algorithm and (3) some homegrown rhythm-analysis. What do you think about that?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- kmfrk 16y agoThat looks absolutely fantastic. forScore doesn't really seem to get the job right, so I'm stoked about Etude. Is it a universal app, or will I have to buy an iPad version separately? EDIT: I just downloaded it, and it doesn't have In The Hall of the Mountain King. I am disappoint.
- andyleclair 16y agoCongrats, Dan!