43. MIDI import: Legatos in scoring apps are drawn using slurs but using overlapping notes is the only way in a DAW to create Legatos (suppressing the Attack bang phase in the ADSR envelope of the following note with a smooth slide into it). In a legato chain of notes, only the first note will have all the ADSR phases while the overlapping notes will bypass the Attack phase and will have just DSR phases. These overlapping notes are creating messy score including dotted 32nd and 64th notes, bleeding notes into other voices for no reason, writing to a grand staff when a single staff would be adequate, missing ties and triplets, under-filled and over-filled bars resulting in out-of-sync playback when imported as MIDI whereas Flat app doesn’t have an issue with this, creates neater imported score and the playback is on-time and rhythmic due to beater score.

Chords are different with overlaps in that all the overlapping notes in the chord start almost at the same location and end at the same location but overlapping notes in a Legato always extend far beyond these start and end locations (unlike chords). And the MAJOR difference between legatos and chords is - overlapping notes in Legatos always play just a SINGLE note at any time sliding into another note in MONO mode (they still sound a single note even during the overlap phase) as opposed to chords that always involve 3 or more notes playing simultaneously in POLY. I think this is where the engraving is getting messy. Maybe StaffPad could make a distinction between these two based on these behaviors and patterns while drawing notes?

I communicated with Flat devs with an idea to draw slurs from overlapping notes in the MIDI file and they confirmed it is feasible and they would work on it soon as Slur-Recognition task.

44. MusicXML import: This is seemingly accurate. Also tried multi-track MusicXML import and it worked without crashes unlike multi-track MIDI import that crashes the app. Most importantly, NONE of the bars are under-filled or over-filled or bleeding into other voices unnecessarily and they play in sync (which are noted as BLOCKERs in MIDI import)!

However, the notes are cramped too closely to each other and overlapping adjacent notes making them mostly unreadable and the ties are not visible until I stretch each bar. It is tedious to stretch each bar in a song. Please resolve this spacing issue. Flat has Layout options for Note Spacing like Compact, Cozy, Comfortable - maybe you could implement such an option to resolve the note-congestion issue or a feature to bulk-resize the bar widths or just an option to re-draw the notes and space them correctly (selected bars or all bars) or redraw the spacing as part of import.

45. VALIDATIONS: Any out-of-range values like invalid velocities in the imported MIDI file should be defaulted (eg: 100 for Velocity) as part of error-handling logic instead of letting them result in messy score or crash the app.

46. Merge Grand Staff into one - This refers to point # 23 above when the imported MIDI creates a grand staff instead of using just the treble staff. Ability to merge the grand staff into a single treble staff and move any notes from the bass clef into the treble staff using ledger lines. This is helpful when there are no notes in the bass staff (and we cannot delete the bass staff) or only a few notes on bass staff and we want to use just the treble staff to reduce clutter. You can offer options to move the bass notes into the same voice or a different voice during merge.

StaffPad's Fenby assistant is slick like Siri - if we command "Add strings", it will add 4 tracks (with cute animations) -

Violins 1 in treble clef
Violins 2 in treble clef
Violas in C clef
Violoncellos in Bass clef




More here -