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BT pedal when MS is not in focus
#1
Hi
I got a BT pedal that works well with MS. For practicing, I use another metronome app along MS. MS on the left side of the screen and the metronome on the right. The problem is that when I change the metronome tempo using my mouse, MS is not in focus/foreground anymore and thus does not capture the input from the BT pedal anymore. Is there any workaround for this so that MS captures the BT input regardless if it is in foreground or not?
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#2
(05-23-2018, 05:19 PM)ks002 Wrote: Hi
I got a BT pedal that works well with MS. For practicing, I use another metronome app along MS. MS on the left side of the screen and the metronome on the right. The problem is that when I change the metronome tempo using my mouse, MS is not in focus/foreground anymore and thus does not capture the input from the BT pedal anymore. Is there any workaround for this so that MS captures the BT input regardless if it is in foreground or not?

Ok, I see my request may sound a bit stupid. Today I tried the built in metronome, turned out to be better than I expected, and hence the pedal problem is somewhat solved (MS is always in focus). Now I have the problem, that the MS metronome behaves differently when I switch songs. Usually I let the metronome run all the time during practicing. Sometimes I change the tempo, but quite often I keep the tempo between tunes. MS has a tempo setting for each song which is nice, but not what I always want when practicing. I'd rather have an song-independent metronome for this. Anyway for practicing even a single piece , one usually starts slow and then increases the tempo so a stored tempo is not of much use.
Coming back to the BT pedal cmd capture thing: The same problem appears if one uses any other tool along MS, for example a drum machiene or a recording app. At least for me an option to globally capture the page turn commands would be useful
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#3
Unfortunately, that's just not possible. The pedal command is just a key command (the same as if you pressed a key on a computer keyboard). That key command is going to be issued to the application with focus. C# UWP apps can't install things like global key hooks to capture key commands issued to other applications (that's usually viewed as a big security risk as it can be used for key logging and such).  So I can't change the way the OS works.

One thing you could try is using a MIDI device with MIDI actions in MobileSheets to change pages. I believe MobileSheets will process those regardless of focus. You'd need a pedal capable of sending MIDI messages though, and I'm not sure if that's readily available.

Mike
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#4
Thanks Mike for the explanation!
I checked with my midi keyboard and indeed pageturns work independent on app focus! I wonder if it would be possible to access a BT pedal keyboard device just like you do with midi? I mean connecting to a specific device instead of capturing generic keyboard events?
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#5
I did some more experiments... WIth
http://www.tobias-erichsen.de/software/loopmidi.html
to create a software midi thru port (on win 10!) and vmpk
http://vmpk.sourceforge.net/#Introduction
to map keyboard events to midi events I could finally use my BT pedal as a pseudo midi device and control pageturns in MS via midi Rolleyes 

However there is still a little problem: vmpk needs application focus as well to send out midi commands. Shit!
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#6
AirTurn has provided me with a few pedals that do support a direct bluetooth connection that does not rely on generic key commands. Unfortunately, this requires Android 4.4. I discussed that in the post here: https://zubersoft.com/mobilesheets/forum...p?tid=4345

Once I'm ready to set the minimum supported version to 4.4, then you would have an option for a BT pedal that works without focus. I just haven't done this yet as I'm trying to deliver functionality to users that are running devices with lower Android versions. I don't want to phase out support for them yet.

Mike
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#7
Hi Mike

I put together some python fragments that do the trick very nicely (together with loopMidi). It is really great to have all the great python packages available to get a job done easily!!! Still a MS built in solution would be much better! I have attached the script in case someone is curious.
Thanks
Klaus


Attached Files
.zip   keytomidi.zip (Size: 661 bytes / Downloads: 2)
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