support percent values to set the tempo

• Oct 19, 2018 - 17:16
Reported version
3.0
Priority
P2 - Medium
Type
Functional
Severity
S5 - Suggestion
Status
active
Regression
No
Workaround
No
Project

It would be a nice feature to allow the usage of a percent value for tempo, based on a "basic tempo".
Why: often scores use tempo advices like:
- ritardando
- a tempo
Actually the user needs to "know" the initial tempo and set something lower for the ritartando and again the initial tempo for "a tempo". But what happens, if the user decides to change the general tempo? He needs to update all places like above.
Ideal would be to have a sort basis that is the tempo used in the beginning of the score. Later a user can then set %-values instead of absolute ones to set the tempo based on this.


Comments

I might be ok to provide a flag for the complete score, saying that the score uses percentage tempo. So, internally everything can be kept as it is and only during editing, tempo is handled as relative to the basic tempo.

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

That's not the same as the OP is requesting. He wants to be able to indicate all but the first tempo change as a percentage rather than an absolute BPM similar to what the Play panel allows. This would enable a composer to change the initial tempo and all subsequent tempo changes would automatically adjust. It would be very useful for rit. and accel. sections where the TempoChanges plugin was used. It would not be so useful when you start at largo (and you're not sure of the BPM) and then change the tempo to andante and know the absolute tempo you want for andante. I would suggest that the percentage of tempo always refer to the last absolute tempo set ignoring previous percent changes in tempos.

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

Oh, did not notice this feature (relative tempo change) so far.
I just tried it - but it seems not be functional - the tempo does not change after inserting these items to my score.

Anyway as mentioned by mike320, this is not completely what I ment. And indeed, the description of him is what would be the optimal solution: allow both: absolute tempo, and relative one's that always reference to the last absolute tempo item.

I would suggest to put a master tempo multiplier for playback, which is set by default to 1.0. When the user wants to hear fine rhythmic details he can set the master tempo multiplier to 0.5, and all the tempo indicators would be played back 2 times slower, preserving the relative tempo changes. This approach should be easier to implement; it should only be accounted in playback and within piano roll, meaning that the tempos indicated locally in the score need first to be multiplied by this global factor to become an actual time indicator. Yet this would provide all the needed flexibility.

That much is already present, it's in View / Play Panel. But that doesn't really address the original request. I take the original request as being relevant when you want to add a ritardando (for instance) to your score that you want to be, say, 20% slower than whatever the original tempo was, but you want it to continue to scale if you change your mind about the original tempo. So you might not want all tempos to scale, just this one. And you don't want this change as just a temporary override to hear details, it's because you've actually changed your mind abut what you want the initial tempo to be, so you are literally editing the original tempo, and you want the ritardando to scale with it, but any subsequent tempo changes you want unaffected by any of this.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

This is exactly the point: tempo changes in the score should not be absolute, but relative to the "main tempo". This could finally imply, that there can be provided text elements like "ritardando" and "a tempo". The user can use them in order to set the tempo to e.g. 70% resp. 100% to the main tempo.