[greenlava]

I did a quick forum search and couldn't find this requested anywhere yet....

Last weekend I played a musical theatre show and used MSP (as I have for my last ~25 shows).  As the drummer with a music director who is also playing keyboard, many times it falls on me to keep the tempo in place of the MD.  Usually it's not an issue, but for some reason on 2 songs this weekend the tempo was really getting bogged down - some combination of the pit and the dancers plus some difficult lick was slowing everything way down (from 210 to ~180).  After dress rehearsal, I remembered I have a phone app called LiveBPM that uses my internal microphone to pick out the tempo it hears and displays it on screen.  sometimes it doesn't pick the right note length for the pulse (so 210 in 4/4 reads as 105), but in any case it gives me a good sense of where I started and a real time visual if I'm starting to drag at all so I can keep it up.  It was super helpful.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/detai...ch.liveBPM

BUT

It's just another device I have to have mounted somewhere in my field of view.  Wouldn't it be nice to be able to have that information as an overlay on my page with a control for location and opacity so I can see it at the same time as reading my music?  I think that would be really nice.  thus, a feature request.

(FYI, I'm also going to reach out to the dev of that app and suggest an overlay mode (similar to FaceBook chat heads) with opacity.  or maybe a team-up as a purchasable plug-in?

thanks!
d

[sciurius]

Isn't it easier to use MSPro built-in metronome to show the desired tempo?

[greenlava]

Isn't it easier to use MSPro built-in metronome to show the desired tempo?

not really.  when I'm playing musical theatre I'm tasked with holding whatever tempo the music director picks, and that could vary from show to show.  I'm not at liberty to pick what the tempos *should* be

[BRX]

Thanks for the mention of LiveBPM. I didn't know that, bought and installed it and will use it in my bands to prove if someone is speeding up (might be me though). :-)

That said I think it goes a step too far to implement that in MSP which is and should stay mainly a sheet reader.

But it gave me the idea for another suggestion. It would be nice to to able to tap the tempo and start an auto scroll with the tapped tempo (which one can tap with the drummer or conductor giving it to the band), so you can sync the autoscroll to the actual tempo provided to the band. I haven't yet thought this through entirely. Maybe two small tapping fields next to each other, one to pick up the tempo and the other for the last tap to start it which can be blended out when the tune has begun. Or a start with a pedal click...

What do you think, Mike?

[Zubersoft]

If you use the tap button to set the tempo in the metronome and then you set up the automatic scroller to scroll based on the tapped tempo, in theory this accomplishes what you are describing. There isn't an exact mapping between the tapped tempo and the scroll speed - I just ran through some calculations based on the number of measures that would be scrolled in a given amount of time. 

Obviously what you have described would all be in one place and wouldn't have to be tied to the metronome, so there is still an argument to add it. I just thought I would mention what currently exists. If people would find what you described useful, I can certainly add it to the list.

Thanks,
Mike

[greenlava]

That said I think it goes a step too far to implement that in MSP which is and should stay mainly a sheet reader.

I don't know that I agree with this.  Android only allows me to have one major app running on the screen at a time, which now means the liveBPM function needs to be full screen on a separate device, which is how I currently use it.  Fewer screens is better for me, so a small overlay would be super useful and prevent me from having another screen I need to mount and power.  I think this is one of those features that people don't realize they need until they have it (I certainly didn't), and helps MSP remain the best performance focused sheet reader.

[Zubersoft]

I'm fine supporting something like this, but unless there is a third party library that makes it simple to convert audio input into BPM, it's going to be quite awhile before I would have the bandwidth to implement something like this. It sounds pretty complex in nature. 

Mike

[greenlava]

I'm fine supporting something like this, but unless there is a third party library that makes it simple to convert audio input into BPM, it's going to be quite awhile before I would have the bandwidth to implement something like this. It sounds pretty complex in nature. 

Mike

Thanks Mike:

    Here's a Java/Android library that might be helpful.  It fires on event "onPercussion" or on other Sound Threshold:

https://github.com/JorenSix/TarsosDSP/blob/master/README.textile

  It also includes provisions for pitch detection, so maybe and On Screen Tuner could be added too.  I'm a drummer, so that doesn't really matter to me, but someone else might be interested

[Zubersoft]

That library would potentially help with detecting percussion, so then I would just have to measure the percussion events over time to determine what the actual bpm is.  The pitch detection stuff is interesting as well. I'll have to test it and see how well it works.

Thanks,
Mike

[otnt]

For a classical musician like myself MobileSheets have few extra features which are not necessary (metronome, midi and audio).
If they would be MobileSheets plugins I would be very happy to disable them.
As well as scrolling because of the large screen I use.
Same would apply for BPM listener.

I do believe people in need would find these features extremely useful but I'm afraid what impact BPM listener would have on battery consumption.

[Zubersoft]

It's not something that would be automatically active. It's something you would need to activate. The metronome is similar, MIDI doesn't do anything if you aren't actively connected to a device (although I could add an option to completely disable the MIDI functionality which would stop it from registering for connected device events), and there is an option to disable audio in the settings.

Mike