Re: [Rosegarden-devel] Update on tuplet rewrite

[D. M. M. <ros...@gm...>]

On 11/16/2013 11:57 PM, Tom Breton (Tehom) wrote:

> Well, not 100% perfect.  I forgot that Beethoven piano sonata 5 also has
> 11-let 128th notes.

Rosegarden can't handle anything with notes shorter than a 64th anyway.

I think there are some rather good and practical reasons for this. 
Above all, I think it's a reasonable thing considering the amateur 
orientation of Rosegarden.  As an amateur musician myself, whenever I 
find a piece with 128th or shorter notes in it (eg. some of the cadenzas 
from the Arban's trumpet book), I have found a piece I'm NEVER even 
going to bother trying to learn.  Let's get real.  When you have to play 
it at 5 bpm to get all the notes without making mistakes, working up by 
3 bpm per week, you'll master this passage, ohhhhh, NEVER!

It's also a huge pain in the ass to implement 128th/256th/512th notes on 
so many different levels.  I don't think our core time base can handle 
divisions that small, there's no room in the GUI for all those extra 
durations, and on top of it all there aren't enough pixels in our icons 
to represent things with that many beams or flags unless we scale the 
entire freaking set down several pixels.  I couldn't say how many hours 
I spent making the current set of icons, but it might have eaten an 
entire month of free time.  No thank you.

Not that anybody was proposing we implement the bizarre extremely short 
durations that were so favored during the Romantic period.  I'm just 
launching a preemptive strike against that idea to dissuade it from arising.

-- 
D. Michael McIntyre