There has been a very decent amount of bugfixes in this release as well (exactly from the places you've linked to, even).
If you're unhappy with the way Reaper is being developed, there's plenty of other DAWs in the sea for you. Saying that it's a weak update after it being almost a year in progress is being an asshole (especially when you're being the only one who actually said it).
[INDENT]In case anyone missed it, we now have what could be called an automation trim mode for the volume envelope.
The actions are in a lose order of importance:
Track: Swap volume envelope and trim envelope
Track: Apply trim envelope to volume envelope, clear trim envelope
Track: Apply volume envelope to trim envelope, clear volume envelope
Track: Toggle track trim envelope visible
The slight downside to this approach needs mentioning though. It is the lack of a visual indicator on the UI.
What does happen is
Your fader on the UI or control surface changes position (if trim and volume envelope are dissimilar)
If one of the envelopes was visible it is swapped out for the other. The trim envelope is black, the volume envelope is green by default.
...
To be fair, the swap doesn't need to be indicated as you're not toggling which envelope you are controlling, you are actually swapping the whole envelope dataset between the fader gain lane and the trim lane. You don't get to control the trim lane, but always the fader gain lane.
I know what you're saying, because I know the workflow you're coming from
I guess if you can't tell from the envelope shape whether you're on your automation curve or your tweak curve, it doesn't really matter which one you tweak
The new mouse modifier for selecting within notes within a measure is a little hit or miss. Took several tries to demonstrate correctly. Seems like we have to click once to select a note, then modifiers and click again to work correctly.
demo:
I like the narration so much that I played this video about 12 times.
It really looks like you are using the cmd+opt+click mouse modifier (select note and all later notes). I can't get the shift+opt+click modifier (select all notes in measure) to misbehave. If you can get it to consistently misbehave could you possibly post a small project?
Import and export are under development and coming soon. Our current plan is to support MusicXML import/export rather than printing directly, so if you want to print scores, you can export to a dedicated notation program like Sibelius, Finale, MuseScore etc, and print from there.
Thanks devs! The notation editor is fantastic. It won't replace my primary notation software but it will be great for last minute changes. I love it.
Is there a way to display only one staff instead of the grand staff? For example, treble instruments like guitar don't need the bass clef and bass instruments don't need the treble.
Something that would be really cool in a future release would be the ability to space the accidentals. (Maybe it's already there and I couldn't find it.) This way, those of us who read their parts wouldn't have to print the scores to record. We could just follow along on the screen! That would be awesome. As it is now, the accidentals can overlap the notes unless the window is zoomed in on one measure. It's kind of hard to look ahead when only one measure is displayed and looking ahead is essential when reading.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Zlornick
Notation looks great at first glance! As far as I know, this is a really inventive method for note input, and a more intuitive experience than Sibelius or Finale's cumbersome system that has a long learning curve for creating simple melodic passages.
Exciting addition all around.
Agreed. I dislike Finale's input method as it is not intuitive and takes longer than needed. Sometimes I think Finale's developers never wrote a score or even use the software. It's not user friendly at all.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by EpicSounds
The new mouse modifier for selecting within notes within a measure is a little hit or miss. Took several tries to demonstrate correctly. Seems like we have to click once to select a note, then modifiers and click again to work correctly.
demo:
Loving this clip! You may well have a viral phenomenon with this one! (I am passing it around like crazy to friends musical and non-musical.
Wonder how long it will take for the other DAW fanbois to pile in for a Reaper dissfest?
Better hurry up and replace it with a vid showing it all working.....
A big congratulations to Justin and the team --- this is quite a milestone, and well worth a big praise.
Notation is a HUGE topic ... and while obviously graphically it is no real competition for programs such as Sibelius or Finale (let alone Dorico once that is released later this year) I think it will be a huge bonus for a lot of people who are interesting in learning to read or analyze music.
And, curiously, some of the features are out of the box already better than Sibelius ... for example, just tinkering around on the piano in real time gets better results (Flexi Time in Sibelius was well intended but the results are usually a mess).
The way it is announced on the main page gave me a few good chuckles as well ...
"REAPER 5.20: We are great programmers, folks. We make the best software. Really terrific software. Everybody says it's the best. (applause)"
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A HUGE thumbs up from me too on this one! I'm a classically trained musician and the notation editor will be something I use frequently. Great stuff.
Piano roll MIDI + Notation = massive workflow improvement for me.
No doubt there's plenty of other goodies in this update that I'll discover in due time too. I only just found the Monitoring FX from many updates ago!!! Funny enough, I found that when looking for the Notation Editor.
Congrats on the release, to Cockos and all involved. A milestone update, definitely checking off lots of boxes!
I've been using the notation editor a lot and I've made a keymap to work mouseless and at speed. It's based on keyboard layouts of other notation programs, but adapted to fit into Reaper's midi paradigm.
One could make their own, but I've put some thought into working it all out, so in case anyone is interested I'm going to upload it to the stash later today
Congrats on the release, to Cockos and all involved. A milestone update, definitely checking off lots of boxes!
I've been using the notation editor a lot and I've made a keymap to work mouseless and at speed. It's based on keyboard layouts of other notation programs, but adapted to fit into Reaper's midi paradigm.
One could make their own, but I've put some thought into working it all out, so in case anyone is interested I'm going to upload it to the stash later today
I like the narration so much that I played this video about 12 times.
It really looks like you are using the cmd+opt+click mouse modifier (select note and all later notes). I can't get the shift+opt+click modifier (select all notes in measure) to misbehave. If you can get it to consistently misbehave could you possibly post a small project?
definitely option-shift click (you can see the held keys overlayed in the video).
That was only 1 of several fails trying to demo the mouse modifiers in the longer video.
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And still with interface bugs and glitches... Maybe it's time to do something Don't get me wrong but design in Reaper is still on lowest part of development.
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I'm happy for the feature additions too, I'll be using the notation editor for sure... but I also agree with you 100% that there's so many things that "aren't right" in Reaper that I really hope would be fixed.
They're mostly about GUI and general usability. And many of them can't be fixed with custom scripts and themes.
Congrats on the release, to Cockos and all involved. A milestone update, definitely checking off lots of boxes!
I've been using the notation editor a lot and I've made a keymap to work mouseless and at speed. It's based on keyboard layouts of other notation programs, but adapted to fit into Reaper's midi paradigm.
One could make their own, but I've put some thought into working it all out, so in case anyone is interested I'm going to upload it to the stash later today
The notation editor is a welcome add-on, even though I use other notation programs so as to write music (and then, I open the MIDI file in Reaper). But, this way, I can identify easier what melody is been played. It would be great a second notation mode in which you could modify the CC lanes as well as the notes.
On the other hand, I think the MIDI editor needs to be improved, but it is getting better and better.
I would like to have a navigation (and intuitive) tool in the MIDI editor that allows me to jump from one marker to another, or something like that.
Besides, in my case it would be fantastic if I were able to use Reaper properly in my two screens. The FX window is a bit annoying because I cannot dock it to anywhere (I'm talking of an hypothetical Generic FX Window, similar to the MIDI editor, which currently I think it doesn't exist). Moreover, the dock feature works well in the window in which I have the main part of Reaper, but it doesn't work that good in the other screen. I know these are my particular problems but maybe they can give you some ideas in order to improve Reaper, which is a great tool and, as I said before, is getting better and better as long as the updates are been released
PD: Since I updated, everytime I change the Midi Track I'm editing it goes back to the first measure, which is VERY annoying in a piece with more than 200 measures. Yesterday it didn't behave like that.
Import and export are under development and coming soon. Our current plan is to support MusicXML import/export rather than printing directly, so if you want to print scores, you can export to a dedicated notation program like Sibelius, Finale, MuseScore etc, and print from there.
Is the title, author, header text etc, part of the MusicXML?
If we could set those parameters in REAPEr, I would prefer direct printing from REAPER. We could use a PDF printer like PDFcreator to create a PDF. This way you only set the Title of the project once in Project Settings in REAPER, and then the header and track name, could be stored in track's properties. So you don't have to put the title, author, header etc each time you want to export one score. And it would be quicker to reprint things if you edit some notes for example.
Well yes, really. Of course, if you need notation, you'd feel this update has something, but it's far from the actual truth.
I think its the complete wrong way of thinking.
Imagine all features are stripped from Reaper that are not used by at least 50% of the users. what would be left? The equivalent of a 4-track-cassette-recorder?
So its always all about the possibilities to keep Reaper open and useful for each and every user.
If you dont use notation - I too dont use notation (anymore) - dont use it. its not in your way. But if you for example sketch out choir-arrangements per midi, you would be lucky to have the notation editor to print it out for the members of the choir. (A friend of mine does exactly this, and now he can switch completely and exclusively to Reaper without fiddling with a bunch of programs.)
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I haven't had time to install 5.20 yet but did read the chapter. Im pretty impressed overall -- not only with the new feature of notation in general but also how smoothly this addition seems to be. Other DAWs had major issues getting their going. It was unusable in Cubase for a whole full release point. And I'm not hearing about any major troubles so far.
But the Chord Notation? I wasn't expecting that. What a gift. I don't know how accurate it is yet -- i.e., does it analyse for all altered chords and such -- but it will be great for playing a keyboard for seeking sounds first and worrying about the chord details later.
Thank you so much for the notation editor! I do almost all of my sessions as 95% midi and mostly orchestral so being able to input actual notes on the front is HUGE!!!
The way you have notes turn into the piano roll bars upon clicking is extremely intuitive and elegant. The inclusion of multiple voices per staff and dynamics is also a surprise. This is far from a "rough first draft". I can tell a tremendous amount of work has gone into this and I couldn't be happier.
Question about dynamics and if you could just point me to the right spot in the manual I'd be happy to do my own research. Can Dynamics and Hairpins be assigned to any Midi CC? What about text? Can that be sent to a CC automation? Also, can we change the colors of the dynamics? It would be awesome to be able to use dynamics for multiple CC's to control dynamic and vibrato intensity for example.
If you were really dedicated you could take some screenshots and stitch them together in gimp...
A quick/dirty PNG/JPG export would really be appreciated... i'm sure PDF and printing is a whole barrel of stuff to deal with, but it seems like a raster output wouldn't be too tough to implement? It'd just be nice to not have to export, import in musescore, go over the whole thing and make sure it imported ok, re-tweak stuff, etc.
Even if it's not perfectly formatted and ready to be submitted for professional duplication, just being able to save-score-as-PNG and have it slice up the measures over a bunch of images would be really useful.
I assumed that the difficulty with printing had to do with the polish and writing vector graphics in PDFs; dunno if that assumption is correct. Since the score is being rastered to the screen all the time already, i was hoping it wouldn't be too hard to just do so to a file instead. (e.g. set the virtual 'screen size' to the desired page size, iterate through the score, write out the images...)
I.e. I don't care about printing per se, I just want a convenient way to make basic images of the score for circulating among musicians, without having to image edit or otherwise pull in other apps. But maybe that's the development they're hoping to avoid. Either way, we're in good hands.