GSoC 2020: Albums, Week -2, Arriving at the airport

Posted 3 years ago

Greetings MuseScore blog readers!

I am Sergios - Anestis Kefalidis, an undergraduate Computer Science student from Greece. As you might have guessed from the title, for the next few months, I will be working on bringing back Albums. Many of you have been waiting a long time for this feature so I am quite eager to hear your thoughts and suggestions :^)

What is that 'Albums' feature? (Synopsis)

'Albums' is a feature that allows you to combine compositions into a larger work. One can use this feature to create, for example, a suite, a symphony, a songbook, or a set of studies. This feature was (and still is) present in MuseScore 2. The goal of this project is to bring it back while conforming to the reliability and quality standards that MuseScore is known for.

Hm... can you go into a bit more detail? (Project Details)

First of all, there will be a new window, the Album Manager where all the new functionality resides. There will be 2 modes of operation, view-album mode and view-score mode (the names aren't all that great). The user can change at will between the 2 modes of operation.

  • In view-album mode, every score is displayed on the ScoreView at the same time and plays as such. The album is like one big, undivided score. This mode is suitable for an album made from ‘strongly-connected’ parts. Like a symphony or a sonata. The scores are displayed as one uniform big work. Where one score ends, the next begins (space should be optimized, there should be no empty white spaces, unless there isn’t enough space for the first pentagram of the new score).

  • View-score mode displays only the selected score. The user can double click on a score (in the Album manager) to change to that. When one score ends (during play) the active tab changes to the next music-sheet/score and starts playing the next score (with an option to delay the playback for x seconds). This mode is suitable for ‘weakly-connected’ works like song-books or collections of exercises.

Naturally, there will be all the old functionality (add score, add new score, remove score, reorder scores, save/load album, print album, join scores).

What new features will you add?

I want to add multiple new features to allow the user to make mass changes to the scores of the album and allow for better organization and usability (one example is the total duration of the album and the duration of each individual score being displayed). I will talk more about these as the project progresses (probably in the next blog post). I would also be glad to hear what users of the Album feature from MuseScore 2 would like.

All this is nice, but I would like a proof of concept to better understand what it's all about.

I recorded a proof of concept video. As you expect the program crashes halfway through :^)
Anyway, I believe that it showcases what the 2 different modes of operation are all about and it also shows the current state of the Album Manager. Enjoy!

https://youtu.be/3yqqAYWtfVQ

P.S. About the title: I decided to name each blog after a stage of travelling to some exotic destination, to make posting these blogs more fun :-)

Comments

• May 18, 2020 - 04:15

Sergios, thank you for posting and sharing the video. I started using MuseScore after MuseScore 3 came out so have no familiarity with albums from MuseScore 2. In your future posts, could you please talk more about the use cases and ways that albums either save you time, or make your life easier as a composer/arranger, or maybe interesting ways they can be used to group individual scores? (aside from movements in a symphony, concerto etc.) Thank you.

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