Show HN: iPad port of my sheet music app Etude | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: iPad port of my sheet music app Etude

etudeapp.com

94 pointsdangrover35 comments

Bravo! Seeing this app makes me want to get an iPad just to play around with it. Well, almost:

As a fairly serious amateur pianist, I definitely appreciate that this could let me ditch my dusty bookshelf of heavy scores, turn pages for me, and keep track of my location on the page. But the real deal-breaker for me is that it doesn't look like I can annotate the music with fingerings and expressive marks. When first learning a piece I probably spend as much time scribbling on the score [in pencil!] as I do reading it with fingers.

This would still be immensely useful for sight-reading though, where page-turns are a much bigger issue than fingering and expression. But it seems ironic to start out learning a piece with Etude, only to graduate back to paper later.

All in all though, this is some really exciting technology.

Nitpick: the built-in synthesizer seems to have a pretty lazy right foot. Pedagogically speaking it'd actually be better to drop the pedaling altogether rather than obscure the harmony -- make it a setting? Even better: make it respect pedaling marks in the score!

Yeah, annotation is coming in 1.2. Keep having to cut features to get the thing out.

Looking into improving the synth as well.

It's sort of deeply ironic that the video doesn't play on iPads.

Yeah, will fix once I'm off of vzarr.

Is yours the app shown on Apple's new iPad commercial?

Naw, that's TabToolkit :(

Ahh. Well yours looks nice. The Store in particular is more attractive than Apple's.

Did TabToolkit come out after your app? The interfaces look very similar. Would you ever consider incorporating other instruments into etude?

Completely unrelated but just found this and you might want to know, if you go to a style like http://etudeapp.com/music/style/9/ballad and then click Home in the breadcrumbs, you go to /home which lands you on a 404 page.

Also, do you have any plans to expand the music library?

Have you considered automatic page turning by analyzing the microphone input?

You would probably have to do 3 different position finding methods to gain enough stability. Like combining (1) FFT note pitch recognition with (2) some beat tracking algorithm and (3) some homegrown rhythm-analysis.

What do you think about that?

That looks absolutely fantastic. forScore doesn't really seem to get the job right, so I'm stoked about Etude.

Is it a universal app, or will I have to buy an iPad version separately?

EDIT: I just downloaded it, and it doesn't have In The Hall of the Mountain King. I am disappoint.

Looks great! The only thing that bugged me was the position indicator, as it didn't have a very predictable motion. Sometimes it goes very fast, other times it just stops. I understand that it's impossible to make the speed constant, but at the moment it really doesn't look natural.

It goes at the speed of the music, depending on how long notes are held. I've been experimenting with that animation...it does seem kinda uncanny valley somehow

I noticed that too. I'm not sure if there's a better way to do it or not; as a piano player myself, it might seem more intuitive to me to have a visual indicator at each beat in the measure, and then just highlight each note (via color or something) as it's played. I think the reason it seems off is because it's so irregular, even though it does match with the music itself.

Kudos though, Etude looks great.

Maybe have a constant-speed thin vertical cursor along with (behind) the jerky highlight? That would help to smooth things out and get out of the "valley."

I'd suggest a combination of both mcav and cpr's suggestions. Highlight the notes themselves instead of the area around them. Drop the jumpy marker and replace it with a smoothly moving, constant speed vertical marker. It's a commonly recognized and understood element (used in pretty much any and every audio production / recording software). It also gives the viewer a better sense of the tempo. Remember, tempo can change drastically over the course of a song; the current marker doesn't demonstrate the difference between playing shorter notes at a slower tempo and longer notes at a faster tempo.

I agree, combining note highlighting and smooth moving marker would seem to be the best way to go.

It's probably best if the moving marker is a 1-inch-wide bar that is very subdued. In my head at least, this would work best.

Or you could just highlight the current bar.

Why'd you choose to use vzaar.com? How much bandwidth does a showcase site like this take up on average?

I chose them because they had a nice looking player and I was in a hurry to get the site up. But they're pretty awful. They charge way too much for bandwidth and the <video> alternative they put in the page doesn't play on an iPhone/iPad. Support is kinda lame too.

Once I find a decent generic flv player I'm moving the videos to my normal CDN.

May I suggest Video for Everybody?

http://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody

What would be nice if there was some kind of foot activated gadget that would talk with the ipad. When pressed it would flip to the next sheet. This would eliminate the breaks when the player has to move the hand off the piano to flip to the next page.

Maybe they could release a foot pedal iPhone app to go along with it?

Like this?

http://airturn.com/

"A Bluetooth version of the AirTurn is currently under development for the Apple iPad, and is expected to be available towards the end of 2010."

Nice. Hopefully the iPad device is a lot less than $200 though.

I'm very excited to try this! Sheet music reader seems like such an obvious application for the iPad. Now I just have to think about how much I trust my shaky stand with my $600 toy.

I've been anxiously awaiting the release of this app. I'm buying day one.

Beautiful! Can I hook it up to any electric pianos?

Cool, but I can't make my own sheet music with it?

(I worked on Finale back in the mid 90's).

Hey, I'd love to get in touch with you and pick your brain about that if possible! Thanks!

Sure, jon.gilkison@gmail.com

There's a song converter that converts music to Etude's format from several others (Sibelius, MusicXML, Lilypond, etc).

It's an internal tool now that just runs on the command line.

But there will be an interface exposed in the coming months so that people can convert music for their own use and also publish to the store.

Congrats, Dan!

Beautiful app and very well put together presentation. As soon as you hit the page the video starts and demonstrates its functionality. Even the best writers fail to fully convey the feel of use, so why not cut to the chase? Congrats, I look forward to using it.

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