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On 1/3/2022 at 11:34 AM, Don Taylor said:

A couple more suggestions for you to consider:

 

1. A dialog box that allows the user to enter a chord by name, or select it in some way which results in all of the notes of that chord being being highlighted on both the keyboard and the Anglo.

 

I finally got around to figuring out a way to do this! I think it has made the app just the slightest bit slower (it was already pretty slow 😒 ), but in my opinion the tradeoff was worth it. When you select a piano key, some chord options will appear below the piano keyboard. Clicking any of those will highlight the chord *in that octave* on both the piano and the anglo. You can still uncheck "match octave" to see all possible notes in the chord across the entire range of the Anglo keyboard. As a bonus, you can hear what the selected chord sounds like when you click it.

 

At the moment, I've included major, minor, dominant 7th, diminished, major 7th, and minor 7th. I can add more if there's appetite.

 

You'll probably need to do a hard refresh to see it work (ctrl + shift + r); I still haven't figured out what causes the weird caching issue.

 

chord-example.thumb.jpg.fe512269bddfd73d165939e3457b47b5.jpg

 

Update 2022-04-13

(Editing this post because I don't want to keep hogging the front page of the forum with minor updates)

 

I've added/fixed a few more things that hopefully make this a bit more useful:

  • Fixed the caching issue! Hopefully no more hard-refreshing required.
  • Extended the allowed range of both keyboards to D2 - D7. Hopefully that covers pretty much all standard treble Anglos.
  • New hard-coded keyboard layouts:
    • 20-button C/G, G/D, D/A (these are useful for people who buy garage sale concertinas on a whim and then need to identify their tuning)
    • George Jones' "Improved Anglo"
    • Zulu Squashbox
  • For custom layouts, the piano keyboard now automatically adjusts its range to match the concertina keyboard
  • Selecting "push only" or "pull only" now completely removes the other bellows direction from view. This makes it easier to read and also reminds you that you aren't seeing all possible options.
  • Optionally remove note labels on either or both keyboards
  • Optionally re-spell accidentals to their enharmonic equivalents (for now this assumes equal temperament, sorry meantone folks!)
  • Optionally color-code octaves! I've seen a few color-coded diagrams elsewhere and personally find that colors really do a good job of conveying an overall sense of the layout:

    anglopiano-2.7-improvements.thumb.jpg.e2f2ea02ed6e50fc8c8440e33316a53a.jpg

 

Update 2022-04-18

I've just added the ability to transpose a layout up or down within Anglo Piano's allowed range (D2 - D7). This has already saved me a lot of data entry, and should be useful to folks who need a layout chart for an instrument in a weird/niche key, or who just want to see their own customized C/G layout in G/D, etc. To use it, just click "edit layout" under the layout dropdown menu:

 

transpose.thumb.jpg.9fc7c8e3fe448370892950e126f3c30e.jpg

Edited by Luke Hillman
2022-04-13: added several new features. 2022-04-13: added transpose feature.
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  • 9 months later...

Howdy folks, some big news today: in my retirement,* I learned some rudimentary programming, and I've just finished completely re-building Anglo Piano from the ground up. The result is, I think, approximately six thousand times better, faster, and more mobile-friendly: anglopiano.com

 

I can see from my server logs that Anglo Piano has a small but relatively consistent group of users. I hope this will improve your experience a lot. I'm pretty sure I've fixed the most egregious usability issues, but I'm relatively new to software engineering,** so please let me know if you encounter any bugs or weirdness.

 

I've also added a couple features that make exploring tradeoffs between different systems and sharing custom layouts a lot easier. I've already found it useful in a couple detailed layout discussions here (example: here's @adrian brown's 38b Jeffries). If you are so inclined, check it out and let me know what you think!


__________

* unemployment
** note to those inclined to look at the code: I'm not a poet yet. my style evolved significantly while I was writing Anglo Piano, and consequently it's spaghetti. I'll be working on cleaning it up as I have time. Don't expect it to make a ton of sense!

Edited by Luke Hillman
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That's great - so much faster and more responsive.

 

On my Android tablet it works perfectly - both in Firefox and Chrome.

 

On my wife's iPad in Safari I noticed two glitches:

- it stops sounding if I leave it (e.g shut the cover) and go back to it. And sometimes when I switch tabs. Probably it unloads. I have to reload it to get it to  play again.

- double tapping a note zooms it in, which is probably not what you want. I wonder if it can be supressed? But I suppose the piano is not for playing tunes on!

 

I see it sets a cookie. Perhaps say why (settings?) in the About box - and whether you collect any data.

 

Edited to add: Actually, I think Chrome is lying. It says there's 1 cookie, but when I display cookies - there isn't one.

Edited by DaveRo
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9 hours ago, DaveRo said:

That's great - so much faster and more responsive.

 

On my Android tablet it works perfectly - both in Firefox and Chrome.

 

On my wife's iPad in Safari I noticed two glitches:

- it stops sounding if I leave it (e.g shut the cover) and go back to it. And sometimes when I switch tabs. Probably it unloads. I have to reload it to get it to  play again.

- double tapping a note zooms it in, which is probably not what you want. I wonder if it can be supressed? But I suppose the piano is not for playing tunes on!

 

I see it sets a cookie. Perhaps say why (settings?) in the About box - and whether you collect any data.

 

Edited to add: Actually, I think Chrome is lying. It says there's 1 cookie, but when I display cookies - there isn't one.

 

Thanks Dave! Yeah, the auto-zooming on iOS is annoying. I can disable it, but that would also disable manual pinch-zooming for all devices, which I'm loath to do. I'll keep exploring ways of addressing that.

 

Chrome is halfway lying. There aren't any cookies, but if you create a custom layout, I'm putting that in localStorage so it stays in your layout dropdown even after refreshing the page (since there isn't a server looking at anything stored locally, I seem to be GDPR-compliant). LocalStorage gets cleared if you manually clear browsing data, so I still recommend bookmarking links to your custom layouts. I should probably mention that in the "about" section.

 

Edit: I'm not collecting any data, so I'll rely on this thread and anyone who's kind enough to participate in user research for all improvements!

Edited by Luke Hillman
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Ah, I forgot that since GDPR (General Data Protection Registration - for our US friends) 'cookies' includes all locally stored data.

 

You're far too modest about your code, btw: it's the javascript eqivalent of copperplate!

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23 hours ago, Luke Hillman said:

... The result is, I think, approximately six thousand times better, faster, and more mobile-friendly...

I don't routinely use this program (because I don't connect my 'workhorse' machine to the internet), but I said it was nice when you first announced the program - it still is! 

 

It's very satisfying when you improve the performance of a program! I recently halved the execution time of several of my programs by the addition of a single line of code!

 

I haven't had a chance to check out all the improvements, but this is clearly a great step forward - congratulations!

 

Edited by lachenal74693
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I'm one of your (sporadic) users, and the speedup is much appreciated - that was really my primary pain point.

 

This has turned out to be a really handy improvement over a simple button diagram. The fact that it's always as close as my phone is also a huge plus, since I don't always have my music folder with me when I start thinking about an arrangement. Thanks for all the work you've put in!

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16 hours ago, Owen Anderson said:

Would be interesting if we could get it working together with my automatic fingering generation project. I just implemented a version that can generate fingering from a MIDI sequence, and was looking into how to expose it as an HTTP API...

 

Owen, let's talk. The way I've currently got things set up, there'd have to be some significant changes (I'm not currently using a button numbering system and don't have any concept of handedness), but it would definitely be worth exploring!

 

@lachenal74693 very satisfying indeed; coming from a no-code design tool is a night and day kind of difference.

 

@Steve Schulteis - yay, glad to hear! I started out using it to arrange stuff myself, but lately I've been mainly using it to geek out over different layout possibilities. I'd love to pick your brain about how you use it at some point, if you're amenable.

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On 12/18/2022 at 3:05 PM, Luke Hillman said:

 

Owen, let's talk. The way I've currently got things set up, there'd have to be some significant changes (I'm not currently using a button numbering system and don't have any concept of handedness), but it would definitely be worth exploring!

 

I finally got my model running in a web-friendly location here. You can currently upload a MIDI file and get back human-readable text specifying the fingering.

 

I could fairly easily change the output to something like JSON or whatever format would be most conducive to integration. And the button numbering scheme is ultimately arbitrary, just currently chosen for my own convenience.

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Great work, Luke. It is really helping me as I explore left hand chord options for my GD 32 button Lachenal. Next step is to make a custom layout for it.

 

Couple of observations -

- It would be nice if there was a way to toggle the sound on and off. I don't need it chiming whenever I click anything, just when I want to hear something specific.

- Currently chord button selection is tied to the octave of the root note selected. It would be nice to have the option to highlight all the note options for a selected chord across both hands, irrespective of octave. This would make chord inversions and harmonising partial chords more 'visible'. E.g. selecting any C on the piano would highlight every C, E and G for the Maj chord.

 

BTW I'm using Chrome on Win 10.

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On 12/24/2022 at 4:17 AM, AndyNT said:

- Currently chord button selection is tied to the octave of the root note selected. It would be nice to have the option to highlight all the note options for a selected chord across both hands, irrespective of octave.

 

I had actually built this, but then decided I'd disable it unless someone asked for it (I figured there was probably a better way to show multiple options for chords, but so far haven't figured out a layout-agnostic way that gives consistently good results). I've now added it back in.

 

Enabling/disabling sound is also on the roadmap as soon as holiday travel is done. Cheers!

Edited by Luke Hillman
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Luke, this is fantastic, thanks for developing it!

I noticed that sharing it to Facebook groups, your URL parser code can't handle the additional garbage Facebook adds to links. I told the folks there to just go to the link manually.

The Facebook links look like:

https://anglopiano.com/?fbclid=IwAR1l7NtBypi_S2FCXQDP6F72cgZCA24ZQ5gWtq3UmwO09eVAH-sQ9xvhdfQ\

Edited by eskin
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On 12/31/2022 at 7:20 PM, Luke Hillman said:

 

I had actually built this, but then decided I'd disable it unless someone asked for it (I figured there was probably a better way to show multiple options for chords, but so far haven't figured out a layout-agnostic way that gives consistently good results). I've now added it back in.

 

Enabling/disabling sound is also on the roadmap as soon as holiday travel is done. Cheers!

Thanks Luke, that's great :)

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On 12/31/2022 at 11:55 AM, eskin said:

I noticed that sharing it to Facebook groups, your URL parser code can't handle the additional garbage Facebook adds to links [...]

 

Thanks for the heads up, Michael -- very rude of Facebook to mess with links like that! I've added a rewrite rule in my server config that should remove the "fbclid" junk. At some point I'll revisit my url parsing code and make it a bit more tolerant of such shenanigans. Let me know if you run into more FB-related issues. I don't have an account there and would never have discovered this myself.

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