Christopher Souvey's Blog

As planned (see last post), I have released an update to the piano for Musical Pro.   The Keyboard and Piano both now support any of the 128 General MIDI instruments (including such favorites as “gunshot” and “bird tweet”).  In addition, I have added a popularily requested feature–choosing what octaves the pianos operate in.  The improved backend also seems to have made the piano load faster and be generally more responsive.

The update is already available in the Android Market as a free upgrade to all Musical Pro owners.  The download should approximately cut Musical’s filesize in half, down to around 250kb (the side effect of this, however, is that the Keyboard and Piano now require an SD card).  Much of the Piano and Keyboard are completely rewritten, so as always, feel free to email me if you encounter any problems.

I just finished rewriting the architecture of Musical’s piano system. I have not made a public release yet and the front-end isn’t yet different, but the back-end now supports any MIDI note and any of the 128 MIDI instruments. In the new few days (hopefully by the end of this weekend), I will be writing a new “Settings” interface for each of the pianos (2-octave keyboard and 3-octave scrolling) that allows you to choose which octaves you want the piano to use and lets you choose what instrument you want the piano to sound like! I hope to release this feature to all Musical Pro owners on or by Monday.

Also related to the piano, I have just gotten permission to include a nice collection of drum loops in Musical. I plan to try add them to the piano in the next week, so you will be able to choose a beat & tempo and play along. This too will be a free upgrade for all Musical Pro owners, and I will post more information in the next week or so, once I’ve started the implementation.

Finally, looking a bit further into the future, I’ve finished designing the interface for a simple melody/notation editor with MIDI export capabilities. The screen will be split between a miniature piano on the bottom and a musical staff on top, with buttons in between to choose note length, insert rests, etc. Expect more details (and possibly a preliminary release) in the coming weeks.

Oh, and I enjoy being spontaneous sometimes, so just because something isn’t on this list, doesn’t mean it won’t be coming out the next couple weeks (in fact, there will almost certainly be some surprises).