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Piano roll view

This chapter deals with the piano roll view of Melys. In this view you can see and edit the notes of a part or a track. Later you will be able to edit the controller values from the same view.

You can have several piano roll views open at the same time, even on the same track. Changes made in one view will be reflected in all other open views.

The piano roll view

This is a very traditional piano roll view. A piano keyboard is down the left hand side and rectangles representing the notes are on the right hand pane. The ruler across the top shows the bars.

When you open a view, the scrollbars are adjusted to show the highest pitched note at the top of the display.

Accessing a piano roll view

You can open a piano roll view on a complete track or for a single part in a track. You can have as many views open as you like, on the same or different tracks, or the same or different parts. Right click on a track in the track information display or a part in the part display. This will bring up a menu, from which you should select Piano roll view. A new notebook page will be opened containing the notes for that track or part. The view can be placed into its own window by dragging on the appropriate notebook tab and dropping it outside of Melys.

If a piano view for a part is displayed then you can only see notes that start within that part. Notes that start before will not be visible even if they extend when playing into the part. When the song is playing, the play position pointer will become visible when the part being viewed is playing, just as you would expect.

There is no way to close a view just yet, the close option in the menu closes the whole song.

Zooming

As will all the graphical views, you can use the zoom buttons to adjust the scale of the display to suit. You can zoom in both the horizontal and vertical directions.

Clicking and holding down a zoom button will cause the zooming to occur continuously until you release the button.

Editing in the piano roll view

Editing is designed to be consistent throughout Melys once you know how to edit in the track view, you should find that editing notes is very similar. The following sections describe what is implemented so far.

Selecting notes

Left clicking on a note will select it. Normally selecting a note will deselect any previously selected notes. By holding down the control key while selecting you can select more than one note. Later you will be able to select notes by dragging out an area, but this isn't implemented yet.

Moving notes

Notes can be moved by dragging them with the left mouse button. Hold down the shift key when releasing the mouse button.

If several notes are selected and you drag one of them, then all the selected notes will move together. So it is possible to, for example, select all the notes of a chord and transpose them together or change their timing.

Copying notes

Notes can be copied by dragging them with the left mouse button. Hold down the control key when releasing the mouse button. It is possible to copy several notes at once by selecting them first. See the previous section on moving notes for more details.

Deleting notes

Notes can be deleted by first selecting them and then hitting the Delete key.