[Geoff Bacon]

Hi Mike.

Many thanks for the recent changes to the metronome; the moving highlighted beat is much easier to use/follow.

For my pdf songs, the top line is, unsurprisingly, used for the song title.
This is usually formatted as 22 or 24 point  Comic Sans MS.
The second line is typically blank (16'ish pt) to provide some spacing from the chords/lyrics

The songs are set to start the metronome as soon as it the song is displayed.

When using automatic cropping, this means that, on 4/4 time for example, the title is typically totally unreadable.
I could get around this by modifying the crop to have more white space before the title but this is possibly going to slightly reduce the scaling of the displayed page.

As a work around, I currently remove all white space above the title; the metronome still overlaps the title but it is at least readable.

Both these methods mean that I can't use automatic crop.

Any chance that the metronome could be dropped slightly so that it doesn't obscure the title? (possibly use a setting for the y offset so that users can adjust to suit their typical song layout).

A better alternative would be to allow the user to create/maintain several metronome "positions" and select the one to use on a particular song from a dropdown list.

Another possibility is that the user could simply drag the metronome to the required position (but it is in the overlay plane, so this would really only be applicable if the top of the page is being displayed and/or scrolling hadn't been initiated)

Not high priority, would just make it more usable.

Cheers
Geoff

[Zubersoft]

I'll definitely look into some more display options for the metronome once time allows. Allowing the metronome to be positioned in a particular corner seems easy enough, but having it store that per song is more troublesome. Providing options to scale up or down the LEDs is another easy option if you just want the LEDs to be smaller. Providing settings for offsets or allowing the user to just drag and drop the metronome to their desired place would require far more work. The metronome is not like a standard Android component that supports touch interactions - I'm just rendering something on top of the screen. In order for the metronome to support drag & drop, I would probably need to implement some kind of placement grid where a box is shown representing each component. You would then drag those boxes to where you want the components to be, and I would then save the placements for each component. The problem is this would need to work on any device with any size screen/aspect ratio, in both landscape/portrait and correctly handle conflicts when components are overlapped by the user. There is also the issue of whether the components should move out of the way if the overlay is shown, which would add additional complexity to the layout processing. I'm sure there are lots of other things I haven't considered as well (such as the fact that the metronome LEDs don't have a fixed width - the number of LEDs and their size is determined by the number of beats per measure).  So I'm not sure exactly what I will support. I'd prefer an easier solution as there is a huge backlog of feature requests and I can't really afford to spend a significant amount of time on any change that isn't going to be very beneficial to most users.

Thanks,
Mike

[Geoff Bacon]

Hi Mike

Thanks for the reply

I don't want you to do a major amount of work on this as I suspect most users don't use the metronome anyway.

I'd be quite happy if there was a setting that would drop the metronome a set number of points from it's current position (this would apply to all songs); this could default to 0 so that it would have no effect unless users enabled it i.e. zero effect to existing users.

I can manage as I am if it is too involved (but it doesn't make a great impression when showing your program to potential new users ).

Cheers
Geoff

[riddellhouse@gmail.com]

Hi, I'm a newbie here, and I have a similar problem. I use the app for classical music, and the metronome generally covers the first bar of the score. How hard would it be for the metronome to be a line drawing (i.e. effectively transparent)?

[riddellhouse@gmail.com]

Hi,

I am a new user, and I also have a metronome problem. The metronome hides the first bar on each page of my score. Would it be possible for the image to be "transparent" such as an unfilled line drawing?

[Zubersoft]

Do you mean just draw the outline of each rounded rectangle instead of filling it in? I think I'd rather add an offset setting as described here or the ability to shrink the size of the LEDs as desired.

Another thing you can consider is changing the display mode so that the metronome either uses the blinking circle or the flashing edges.

Mike

[riddellhouse@gmail.com]

Hi Mike,

Your answer made me realise that there are different metronome styles. I had the one which looks like an old-fashioned manual metronome: the image is quite large. I have now worked out how to change it or hide it. Problem solved.

Thanks,
Gary