Playground Forums

Hi,

The MXL file format can be used by notation software to generate sheet music for printing. It's also possible to automatically play/validate songs stored in that format (seems like what playground sessions software is doing). It's better then regular MIDI files, because it correctly recreates sheet music (with measures, signatures and other stuff).

I wanted to suggest MXL file import feature to the app as alternative to playing predefined songs.

This way if a user have song he wants to play and see feedback he can import it from MXL file instead of waiting for it be available publicly.

Thanks.

Thank you for the suggestion, I'll run it by my colleagues in our meeting next week.

Best,
Andrew

I was wondering, what did the team have to say about this?

I was wondering, because I use a program to do this (it isn't really designed for validation, like PGS) and it doesn't work well. But I suspect the PGS team is much better than the developers of the other program.

I'm just curious what their thoughts were.

@Russ1409, what is the program you're using? I'm using Sibelius currently to play contents of Music XML files. Unfortunately it doesn't validate how I play either.

After speaking with the team, I can confirm some information about import of XML files... (is that what you meant?)

We're not ruling out the possibility of users importing their own music, but the programming side of things is awfully tricky when it comes to importing user files. I can't guarantee a timetable for it, and to be transparent, it's not a high priority right now for the app.

Understood, thanks for the reply Andrew.

aik099 wrote: ↑

Fri Jun 01, 2018 9:22 am

@Russ1409, what is the program you're using? I'm using Sibelius currently to play contents of Music XML files. Unfortunately it doesn't validate how I play either.

I've tried about all of them, including Sibelius, trying to come close to replicating PGS with imported music. None of them work particularly well. For the most part I just use Musescore and write my own scales, or do the Hanson exercises.

Ideally I would like to build something very simple from opensource components to:

1. accept MusicXML files as input
2. render sheet music from MusicXML file
3. accept user input from MIDI controller
4. display notes as user plays

I've found different applications so far, but none of them was able to do all of above. Some apps were quite cool and even worked on iPad, but only accepted sheet music in proprietary format.

The real benefit of something like Playground Sessions is getting to work on songs in bite size chunks and then putting them together when you have mastered the chunks. That includes playing just one hand of a section. So I'll first want to chunk the song into reasonably logical "chunks" and then play just the right and just the left hand parts for that chunk until my hands "know" what they're doing - then combine the hands together. Then the next chunk, and so on. That's what the Playground Sessions songs do. I'd like our "imported" songs to be able to be processed along similar lines. Obviously we won't have the musicians creating a backing track for us, and we won't have the professional perspective on creating the right chunks out of the songs. But that beats having no way to import our own sheet music at all.