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Updates For Blind Users
#1
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Greetings Mike!

I am a classical organist who is rapidly losing my sight.  One thing about classical organs is the fact that the music rack can be much higher than the normal line of sight.  For the last several years I have confined myself to charts that I have memorized over the years.

A friend told me about a progy used by some apple users, and I was convinced if it was good enough for them, then somebody creative surely must have built one for the Android world!  That brought me to your progy!

Now comes the fun part.  You have the basic components in place, now how do we combine them for the blind musician?

1) We need a way to take a captured chart, and take all of the lines of music on the page(s)) and make them one continuous line of music that can be scrolled across the screen.  (For instruments like organ, and piano do not break treble and bass clef apart) They have to scroll together.

2) Naturally this strolling score has to be able to be zoomed in, or out for the user's needs.

3) The scroll speed needs to be MIDI controllable.

4) Are you ready for the icing on the cake?  MIDI output from the instrument should be able to control the scroll.  The software should be able to follow the MIDI output from the instrument, know what measure the musician is playing, and have that in a scrolling focus box on the screen.

4A) The focus box should be adjustable by the user so that it can appear on the left, right, or center of the screen..

Thank for your kind review of this request in advance.


Regards,
The Admiral
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#2
Hello,

Thanks for the feedback. Comments below:

1) This is certainly something I would like to do, but it's very complex to implement and only works well if the images in the files do not have a lot of noise and there is clear separation of the staves. So it's something I will work on after I've handled other high priority feature requests.

2) This would be somewhat controlled by the implementation details in #1, but I imagine it would be quite flexible if there is just a single staff displayed at a time.

3) Are you saying that the scroll speed should be something you can increase/decrease with MIDI messages, or are you saying that the scroll speed should be following the tempo indicated through MIDI Timing Clock messages or something along those lines?

4) This is something that is not going to be possible for PDF and image-based files unless there is an open source library that can be used in a commercial application to handle Music OCR. Music OCR (the conversion of images to a representation where information is obtained about each note on the score, dynamics and timing) is incredibly difficult to do well and is very error prone. Most Windows-based software products that can do this well are hundreds of dollars per copy. Alternatively, I could only support this for files that contain information about notes and timing such as MusicXML. However using the microphone to track the notes being played by the instrument and use this to accurately track where you are in the score is not a simple thing either. This is the kind of thing that takes many months of work to implement and longer to become accurate enough to rely on.

Mike
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#3
In the meantime you could try this program  largeprintmusic.com 

I came across it when I did a google search for big print sheet music for a friend. I think I typed large sheet music in the search.  I looked at the program and thought it was sort of neat for the visually impaired.  I'm also legally blind in one eye so I bookmarked the page in case I need it in the future.

I don't have any detailed experience with the program.   If that was wrong of me to post this Mike you can delete it.
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#4
That's perfectly fine - I appreciate when users share potential solutions for issues or workarounds for limitations until I've had time to address them. 

Mike
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#5
Greetings Mike!

Thank you for your kind review.  As always, if it was easy, a caveman could do it.  Smile. Now these are features you can keep in mind for the future.  Thank you again for a high quality Android program.


Regards,

The Admiral
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#6
(03-22-2022, 05:42 AM)InstrEd Wrote: In the meantime you could try this program  largeprintmusic.com 

I came across it when I did a google search for big print sheet music for a friend. I think I typed large sheet music in the search.  I looked at the program and thought it was sort of neat for the visually impaired.  I'm also legally blind in one eye so I bookmarked the page in case I need it in the future.

I don't have any detailed experience with the program.   If that was wrong of me to post this Mike you can delete it.

Greetings!

What a clever sounding progy.  I shall give it a look see.  One never knows what may work, if you don't try different things.



Regards,

The Admiral
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