I like this. I’m not as impressed with it as many others seem to be, since I’ve worked with Encore and Sibelius a lot and they have almost this exact feature. That is, they play synthesized audio while moving the bar along with the sheet music. But it is nice to have better-played music to listen to while following along with sheet music.
I do also sometimes pull up some classical sheet music and try to read it along with a recording. So if you get a bigger library that includes pieces I end up being interested in, your site would be useful in that respect. I would enjoy the safety of having the red bar following along to make sure I don’t lose my place.
You said on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6226990 that the left and right arrow keys should move by page, and not by measure, and they’re just mislabeled. I think it would actually be more helpful for the arrow keys to move by measure. That’s what I’m used to in other programs, and I would want to do that more often. I often move back a measure or three back to replay a complicated part I just heard. Moving back a whole page is too much, and using the mouse to click the previous measure is less efficient. You could still keep the keyboard page-moving functions, but bind them to Page Up and Page Down instead.
I’ve used Transcribe! (http://www.seventhstring.com/xscribe/overview.html) before to manually mark up the measures and beats of pieces. You say you have some JavaScript tool that helps you mark up pieces, and I would love to see it, but you might also want to look at Transcribe! and see if that makes marking up pieces easier. Transcribe! uses a proprietary file format, but it’s not too hard to extract the beat times by parsing the text of the file.
Another scrolling method you could try to help people keep their place is showing two rows/systems at once. When you get to the end (right side) of one row, move the bar to the left side of the next row, and then scroll the next row up, displaying the row after that below it. I’m thinking of the effect in this video, which uses Finale Notepad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxTav4S-4Tk.
I'm also a long-time Sibelius user, but was missing high-quality (real) audio together with the playback... So thanks for the comment.
The javascript that I use to partition a score is extremely simple - all it does is play the song while I click on the note in the score that is currently being played. This allows the script to "register" the x-coordinate together with the the current position in the audio, at each click.
That results in an array of [x-coordinate, time] pairs, which are then used to control the speed of the cursor movement.
If it makes sense for to let people upload their own pieces (some have asked for that), then that functionality would certainly be made available!
As for the scrolling, I think that it's great for piano pieces (or pieces with just a few parts), and I might consider implementing that also. It wouldn't be possible for larger scores with multiple instruments, but I think it would work better than the current solution for smaller scores.
Finally, great idea regarding the measures / page movements! I will re-map the keys so that page up / down scrolls a whole page, and the left right keys just scroll one measure at at a time. Please look out for that improvement in the next day or two ;)
I do also sometimes pull up some classical sheet music and try to read it along with a recording. So if you get a bigger library that includes pieces I end up being interested in, your site would be useful in that respect. I would enjoy the safety of having the red bar following along to make sure I don’t lose my place.
You said on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6226990 that the left and right arrow keys should move by page, and not by measure, and they’re just mislabeled. I think it would actually be more helpful for the arrow keys to move by measure. That’s what I’m used to in other programs, and I would want to do that more often. I often move back a measure or three back to replay a complicated part I just heard. Moving back a whole page is too much, and using the mouse to click the previous measure is less efficient. You could still keep the keyboard page-moving functions, but bind them to Page Up and Page Down instead.
I’ve used Transcribe! (http://www.seventhstring.com/xscribe/overview.html) before to manually mark up the measures and beats of pieces. You say you have some JavaScript tool that helps you mark up pieces, and I would love to see it, but you might also want to look at Transcribe! and see if that makes marking up pieces easier. Transcribe! uses a proprietary file format, but it’s not too hard to extract the beat times by parsing the text of the file.
Another scrolling method you could try to help people keep their place is showing two rows/systems at once. When you get to the end (right side) of one row, move the bar to the left side of the next row, and then scroll the next row up, displaying the row after that below it. I’m thinking of the effect in this video, which uses Finale Notepad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxTav4S-4Tk.