Post by Hekhound in Music Box for Playdate comments

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beats per minute (bpm) as an integer value would likely be best. this would replace the descriptive speed settings that are currently implemented. if you want to get fancy, you could have the Italian tempo names display in the tempo selection menu when the corresponding numeric values are selected (i.e. "Allegro" when the user selects a bpm between 109 and 132).

I know that Music Box begins omitting consecutive notes at faster speeds, so a high tempo limit just before that happens would be perfect.

the low value could be around 40. anything less that doesn't have much practical purpose, though I suppose there's no harm in setting it to 1.

Hekhound301 days ago

you could call it something other than bpm, since it's really notes per minute

Tizian Zeltner301 days ago

Yeah notes per minute sounds like the clearest option. (BPM is potentially confusing because it won’t quite be what people usually expect it to be.)

I was looking into the code requirements of this a bit yesterday and it should be totally doable. This also made me realize that the “NPM” are quite high for all three settings currently. And really somewhat arbitrary: Slow: ~195 NPM Medium: ~260 NPM Fast: ~390 NPM

An integer option for this (per tune) would be a nice addition indeed.

Hekhound300 days ago

looking forward to this! i've sunk some serious time into this app

while the values you already have for speed might seem high, the npm can be anywhere from two to four times greater than the bpm for a song. the notes for most songs are going to be a fragment of a beat, maybe half a beat, or even a third or fourth of a beat.

some of the songs i've transcribed would sound best at around 600 npm if the smallest unit in the rhythm is a sixteenth. this would equate to 150 bpm. by the same reasoning, the lowest reasonable npm for songs using eighth notes would be around 40, as that would be 20 bpm.

my idea of using italian tempo names in the menu is probably not going to work out, since npm doesn't account for meter and division of the beats. 260 npm would be Vivace (130 bpm) if ♪eighths♪ are the shortest value, but Adagio (65 bpm) if ♬sixteenths♬ are the shortest value. i don't think there will be an easy way to incorporate it

Tizian Zeltner300 days ago

Yeah exactly. In principle the correct tempo names would be cool, but I think it adds more confusion than it solves.

Tizian Zeltner298 days ago

I’ve uploaded version 1.1.4 with the new feature.

NPMs go from 40 to 680 at the moment, which is hopefully enough range. (40 seems comically slow, and some point after 680 the current game logic isn’t accurate enough anymore to play all notes.)

Hekhound298 days ago

amazing!

I just spent some time updating my tracks to utilize the new wind-up tempo feature. I just uploaded them to the shared directory

check them out if you have a minute 😁

Tizian Zeltner298 days ago

Thanks for sharing these! I just went through all of them and they’re all so nice!

Glad you’re having so much fun with it :)

Tizian Zeltner298 days ago

Oh, and I forgot to mention: the setting can be different for all tunes and is saved separately.

Hekhound298 days ago

this is such a huge improvement 😍

thanks for your work

itch.io

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