#91 Any support for chant or free tempo (umeasured) music?

[Antonio Bonifati]

I see you strived to support variable time signatures, but if my music is measured, I will use that feature sparingly, if not at all. On the other hand, if my music is unmeasured (free tempo we say in Italian), I am forced to change the time signature so often in order to be able for notes to cross a measure boundary, and that makes Aria Maestosa unpractical to use for this kind of music. There should be an unmeasured mode which allows me to get rid of vertical measure bars. I tried as a workaround to set a time with a great numerator value, but no more than 32 is accepted.

Is this a feature difficult to implement programmatically speaking? Is there another workaround?

[M Gagnon]

Aria is built around the idea of measures, so what you are describing could not really work within the current framework - it also is a very uncommon request.

So it's possible, but not easy and will probably not be a priority due to being a fairly uncommon request, sorry

[Antonio Bonifati]

Well, if this is so, all your pretty GUI is useless to me. I will continue
to use midge, a perl script to generate midi based on a simple text-mode​
note language, which does not force one to use measures.

But you better reconsider your point of view. Even LMMS allows notes to be
across measures. Most composers use sequencers to try out ideas and
initially compose unmeasured, only worrying about making their music
measures later. What you do not want to support is thus a really useful
feature, not a strangeness. Before computers came composers have uses blank
sheet music without measures at will.

[M Gagnon]

I understand that this could b very useful to many people, the unfortunate reality is that unfortunately Aria is free and I only work on it in my free time, and I have very little free time at the moment I'm afraid. So sorry if you thought I doubted the usefuless of your suggestion; it's more that it's unlikely I will have the time to do that anytime soon since there are other often-requested features that I haven't had the time to implement yet. I can definitely keep this ticket open as a reminder, though I don't expect I will have the time to work on it soon, sorry

[M Gagnon]

One addition though, you mention "Even LMMS allows notes to be across measures.". I think we may have a misunderstanding here, it is definitely possible for notes in Aria to cross measures and has always been, just draw a note across a measure line by dragging the mouse cursor across

[Full_name]

I see what he means. He just needs to press Ctrl+8 to make measure as small as 1/128. That's close enough to "unmeasured".