[sciurius]

This is a feature suggestion from a ChordPro user on the ChordPro forum.

I propose a new directive, e.g. ${timestamp: 1:32}, that may appear anywhere in a chordpro file, and it will indicate the time of the song when this line is to be played.

Interactive chordpro viewers will then be able to use it in order to correctly implement autoscrolling, with linear interpolation between each timestamp.
Authoring the timestamps is easy; just watch the song video and pause at the right time.

What do you think?

[Zubersoft]

It's definitely an interesting idea. It would require a fair number of changes in the automatic scrolling logic, and I'd have to figure out how to tie that in with the existing automatic scrolling settings. Should there be an option in the automatic scrolling that is only available when using a chord pro file that says something like, "Use chord pro timestamps"? What if the timestamps are missing? Should it fall back to the "Scroll continuously through the entire song" behavior? That behavior requires a scroll speed to be specified though, and that setting would be disabled or hidden when using chord pro timestamps, so I guess it would just fall back to the default scroll speed in that case? This also requires some more complex logic to figure out the position where that timestamp directive is on the rendered page (so MobileSheetsPro would have to either track the next visible line or something alone those lines), so it can determine how many pixels need to be scrolled based on the offset between timestamps. This is all doable, it just seems like it will require a fair amount of work, so it's probably not something I can implement in the short term.

Mike

[Geoff Bacon]

Mike

I seem to remember someone else requesting a similar thing but it wasn't directly targeted at ChordPro files (probably at pdfs)

I think they suggested that one played the song in real time and then marked the pdf to show how long each section took; MSP would then automatically adjusted the scrolling as the song progressed. Ideally, for those with touch screens, one would like to press a button on the screen to "remember" the times and then have someway of placing them in the pdf (saves having a timing device) but I suppose a user could use a stopwatch, write the times down and then modify the pdf.

By definition, scrolling implies that there is more than one page. Once MSP has decided on a scroll speed, it should maintain that until it reaches another mark. While jumping to a different page is probably best avoided, it could be supported provided the user placed a mark at the jump target (and probably one immediately before the jump).
ChordPro is probably easier in that one shouldn't need to jump back.

I'm not saying you should implement any of this; just bear it in mind should you provide a similar mechanism for chordpro files.

Keep up the good work

Geoff