PLEASE HELP: Feedback for the new Piano Trainer

Hi All,

As you may know I am developing a new Piano Trainer.

What is there now is just the tip-of-the-iceberg. I plan to make this a full-blown training program that works in any browser on any device.

I am looking for feedback and suggestions that will help guide the development.

SCROLLING:

• Question: Should the Piano Trainer present notes line-by-line and scroll top to bottom, or have only one line and scroll right to left?
• BACKGROUND: Currently there is a "cursor" that goes from left to right, and the staves are organized into lines that scroll as the song is played. I originally thought it would be good to get students accustomed to reading ahead line-by-line as much as possible, so that students develop skills that translate into reading paper sheet music. Another advantage of this approach is that it makes printing paper copies easy. The problem with this approach is that it wastes space as opposed to having a single line with all staves, that scrolls from right to left. (Example: One measure of sixteenth notes is sixteen notes, which is more than half the current page width, which means that only one measure appears per line, followed by a significant amount of white space?

EDITOR:

• Question: What formats should be supported? Which one should be supported first
• BACKGROUND: The random-generator is just a place-holder until the trainer offers the ability to create custom songs (and ultimately save them). I think the ABC Notation looks great for editing the song (I don't think WYSIWYG note editing is worth the effort). Since there are abc.sourceforge.net/abcMIDI/ converters, I think this one format will suffice. I'm open to suggestions here.

ON-SCREEN KEYBOARD:

• Question: How should this work? How many keys is reasonable on an iPad?
• BACKGROUND: In the trainer I resize the keyboard to 49,61,or 88 keys based on the range of notes to be played in the song. I bet these keys are really small on an iPad. If I only put one octave then touchscreen users have a usable keyboard, but it doesn't help students learn the physical location on a real piano. I can add an octave auto-select setting to turn on/off so that Students can set the trainer to force them to select an octave, but this seems clunky. I am committed to making this work without a MIDI device, but I need help figuring out what is the best way to do this.

Best,

Ryan