Notation Spacing

Mr. PC · 10-19-2021, 01:51 AM

Notes often get too squished together to see easily; I end up having to look in piano roll to note what the exact notes are, which is a pain since I'm an old-school note guy.

Would be great if we could expand bars, or just in any way space notes out to be more readable; also useful for performers if I'm exporting PDF (I find exporting XML and importing to Musescore, there are a lot of errors, and I spend ages correcting the notation in Musescore, so it's not an ideal workflow either).

Ideally if we could make notation "look" like Musescore, but I guess that's asking too much, so maybe if we could just increase the note-spacing. The squishing is especially bad with accidentals. I wonder if Reaper could simply add space automatically for accidentals. Or like, a "nothing should touch each other" spacing option :P

https://ibb.co/jkLRkWt

Mr. PC · 10-19-2021, 02:00 AM

Somewhat related, but I wish we could hide individual notes (not hide the same pitch for the entire song, but just a singular instance of that note). For example, in the picture, I've written a violin natural harmonic.

That bottom note is used only for Kontakt, because I'm having the violin play an artificial harmonic on a note 1 octave lower to mimic the sound of the natural harmonic. In other words, what I've written for the performer, and what I'd written for Kontakt, are 2 different things. I want to hide those bottom notes, which are for Kontakt only, but not from the entire song, only for those 2 instances.

Mr. PC · 10-19-2021, 02:20 AM

Also, zoomed in doesn't help. You can zoom in forever, and it's always squished. I'm like to even send screenshots to performers sometimes, but I can't really make this readable.

Outboarder · 10-19-2021, 02:31 AM

Yea, that looks unreadable, that's why I don't use it.
I hope for a fix.

bFooz · 10-19-2021, 06:49 AM

If someone happen to not know, there is a function "musical note spacing", which when activated does space notes inside a bar to be more readable.

As for zooming, the main problem is that horizontal and verical zooms are NOT independent and are tied by some strange logic.
https://forum.cockos.com/showthread....02#post2135502

But by far the biggest problem is that the devs seem to not have any interest in dealing with notation. I have around 20 unresolved notation bug posts.

bFooz · 10-19-2021, 06:51 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mr. PC

Somewhat related, but I wish we could hide individual notes (not hide the same pitch for the entire song, but just a singular instance of that note).

I've been wanting this as well. Maybe let's make some noise in the 6.38 thread when the note reordering has been implemented now.

sockmonkey72 · 10-19-2021, 09:23 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bFooz

I've been wanting this as well. Maybe let's make some noise in the 6.38 thread when the note reordering has been implemented now.

I wonder aloid if this is really related to the note order feature. It's more about adding articulation awareness. Not only do you want those notes to be hidden from notation, you want them to be exempt from transposition. Maybe people work around this by putting meta-MIDI on a separate track? I haven't done any projects using articulations in REAPER yet, don't know the tricks...

sockmonkey72 · 10-19-2021, 01:46 PM

... In fact I see that ReaTiculate remaps everything in terms of Program Changes, presumably to mitigate this issue. Interesting...

Mr. PC · 11-03-2021, 02:25 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bFooz

If someone happen to not know, there is a function "musical note spacing", which when activated does space notes inside a bar to be more readable.

As for zooming, the main problem is that horizontal and verical zooms are NOT independent and are tied by some strange logic.
https://forum.cockos.com/showthread....02#post2135502

But by far the biggest problem is that the devs seem to not have any interest in dealing with notation. I have around 20 unresolved notation bug posts.

The Musical Note Spacing doesn't do it for me... actually better without. I think what it does is e.g. makes a halfnote more spaced than an 8th note.

But I'm running into problems with e.g. 32nd note runs that have accidentals. It needs to make space for the accidentals, and needs to make *more* space for the 32nd notes.

bFooz · 11-03-2021, 04:28 AM

What I see is that the Musical Note Spacing is giving more space to shorter note values.

As for spacing of 32-notes, I guess it brings out the problem with fixed-length measures. When I work with such short notes, I zoom in horizontally. The longer notes/more empty bars are not ideal - too long - but at least I can see the shortest notes. This also brings us to the problem of zooming in notation which is really bad, without scripting unusable.