Re: resizing the virtual MIDI keyboard

[Richard Shann]

On Sun, 2020-02-09 at 12:38 -0500, Bric wrote:
> > On February 6, 2020 at 8:01 AM Richard Shann <address@hidden.c
> > om> wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > On Wed, 2020-02-05 at 18:09 -0500, Bric wrote:
> > > I am running denemo with a touch-screen monitor right now.
> > > 
> > > It occurs to me that it would be totally awesome to make the
> > > virtual
> > > MIDI keyboard resizeable such that the keys actually expand to
> > > greater pixel dimensions, to one's liking
> > > 
> > > With touch-screen you can actually use your fingers to tap the
> > > screen
> > > and play (!). Except right now it does not re-scale (only lets me
> > > resize the window horizontally, and with that it simply fills the
> > > greater width of the window with *more* keys, rather than expand
> > > the
> > > keys' size), and my finger tips are too big for the keys drawn on
> > > my
> > > screen.  If i resized the keys by just 30%, say, it would be an
> > > awesome way to input data.
> > 
> > That sounds like a good idea. It is in fact already possible: if
> > you
> > type
> > (d-VirtualKeyboard 2)
> > into the CLI box of the Scheme window and hit Return you get a two-
> > octave keyboard which you can then resize to fill the width of your
> 
> This works!  I invoked it with three octaves (changed the 2 to 3),
> and that works fine with my 1600x900 resolution. When I resize
> horizontally, the width of the keys also extends to where you can
> avoid fat finger touch misses)
> 
> So, nice touch-screen play/input. Might come in handy for some
> scoring, at some point. (Right now, the purely typing input speed is
> still very competitive with the keyboard input - given the need to
> change duration and a slew of other properties)

The duration change is well handled by putting in multiple durations -
a whole bar, line or movement before starting to play on the MIDI
keyboard. The numeric keypad is set up so that slurs can be added
without extra keypresses when entering the durations and ties require
only one keypress on the tied note. For my work I also insert dynamics
and ornaments as I enter the durations - I make sure these require only
key strokes to do. Then I can start playing the pitches and the cursor
automatically goes back to where I started entering durations.
I noticed some pitch-spelling errors in the Denemo file you sent - Eb
for D# etc, which is a hazard if you are playing the notes on a MIDI
keyboard, but for tonal music this is mitigated by sounding augmented
and diminished intervals on a different channel.

> 
> I should also note that "Virtual MIDI Piano Keyboard" (VMPK) does not
> respond to touch-screen input for some weird reason - only mouse
> clicks.
Are you referring to
http://vmpk.sourceforge.net/
here?

Richard