What’s new in SMB 22.6 release

Below are our every two-week work updates of the development of Sao Mai Braille since last major version 22.2, released in March 3^rd, 2022.

May 26^th, 2022

• Pedal down direction at the end of measure will be moved to beginning of next measure. And pedal up direction at the measure beginning is moved after the first measure note.
  • Hairpin ending at the measure beginning is moved after the first measure note. This rule is applied same for line endings (bracket and dashes).
• Treated all cross voice ties as normal ties if the start and stop notes have different number of voices on the same staff.
• Write voice with all printed rests together with other voice on same staff (previously ignored rest voice).
• Offset duration is calculated when moving directions to one same voice (previously just calculated offset duration of the destination voice). Directions stand alone on its own voice number is moved to the voice with notes on same staff. In addition, direction at same duration value with note, it is placed before the note but is placed after the note if direction has attribute type=”stop”.
• If a note has slur stop and start at the same time, it’s not treated as nested slur anymore. And nested ties are also ignored to be forced the usage of long slur dots 46-46. Previously, all these cases were forced to use long slur brackets, dots 56-12 and 45-23.
• Long slur with dots 46 is correctly placed before written note instead of the interval note of the chord.
• Long slur with doubling dots 46 now has been improved and worked well when turning off the Use long slur bracket option. Added two new slur and tie related options:
  
  • Slur sign position in chord: 1) place after last interval sign (US style) and 2) place right after written note (some other countries).
  • Restate slur and tie ending before the first note of parallel.
• Fixed wrong placement of barlines when turning of Combining multiple voices into chords option.
• Fixed not to put measure separator sign between two adjacent passages with hidden rests on different voices when applying partial in-accord mode.
• Fixed issues and improved performance between associated translation options of partial in-accord mode, combine multiple voices into chords and apply stem notes.
• SMB new features:
  
  • Keep same cursor position when translating from print to Braille, and from rich-text to plain Braille view modes. Supported for document with headers, footers, tables and other translatable objects.
  • Supported to save Braille into .bra Spanish Braille format.

May 12^th, 2022

• Supported both partial in-accord and stem note on same staff. There’s no more loss of notes on other voice.
• Supported to apply stem note sign for tuplets.
• Supported to combine hidden voice with only directions with other voice on same staff. And applied offset duration by stem signs for these directions if needed.
• Supported moving pedal signs from different voices to one voice and applying stem signs. The engine will move pedal start and stop signs to one same voice if fixed in note duration. Otherwise, it will keep on same voice of pedal start sign and apply stem sign.
• Fixed: wrongly place measure separator sign; extra dots 3 after hand sign when indicating staff change; wrong partial accord for full in-accord measure; no need to indicate staff change as starting on the same staff at the parallel beginning; improved long cross voice and staff slurs; improved extra ties without tie start or stop; improved some special note grouping cases when translated with repetition option.
• SMB other new features and improvements:
  
  • PEF file is automatically saved in Unicode.
  • Added new tables for internal conversion of between ascii and Unicode Braille (ascii-us-patterns’.cti, ascii-to-Unicode.dis, Unicode-to-ascii.dis).
  • Supported BRF and BRL view modes from SMB Braille rich-text document window.
  • Improvements: don’t name translated Braille files with “Braille #” as prefix of the original filename; document title has word “print” or “Braille” to indicate document content; fixed focus loss when open and save music profile; and fixed issue of conflict between old SMB.ini config file when updating to new release.

May 4^th, 2022

• Improved algorithm to handle more cases of tie, including: ties without start or stop, chord and single-note ties crossing voice or staves, ties for arpeggio, and added two user options to toggle applying L.V. ties.
• Supported slur cases for chord, using same rules of single-note slur cases.
• Fully supported for both chord interval and voice direction based on different settings, which are included:
  
  • Custom for specific score: transcribers can specify exactly staves to be treated the direction as going up or down.
  • Instrument settings: transcribers can easily config global settings for different instrument types right in the Instruments.xml setting file. By default: single-part and chamber transcription modes are treated similarly for the interval and voice direction such as: keyboard has right hand down and left hand up. String type is based on its clefs (treble assigned to down and bass assigned to up direction) etc. While, orchestra mode will be all in up direction by default.
  • Third-level interval and voice direction option: is mainly used for future applying to selected range of measures.
• Supported to handle voice numbering in two methods, 1) Re-number all voice in unified order, and 2) Keep using MusicXML voice generated numbers for checking cross translation rules such as cross voice/staff slur and tie.
• Supported voice and staff changing and hand division: at the beginning of score, the staff and hand division will be detected and assigned based on its starting staff. Then, it will be reassigned to other hand if meeting a whole measure changed to other staff.
• Improved the whole system to re-define global and local variables in order to correctly handle translation processing at different levels from staff, part and multiple parts. In old method, global variables were used for single part and applied for multiple parts. Therefore, there are some unintentional translation results for uncommon rules of part of different instrument type.
• Supported to apply more than one partial in-accords in a measure and not to apply note grouping if the group is separated.
• Automatically assigned voice number for un-numbered note element. Treated all notes of a chord same as voice number.
• Added one mandatory condition of same accidental together with same octave and same pitch step in order to be applied stem note sign. And supported new advanced stem note cases: by default, stem note sign is treated as a normal note attached with its most elements, except the following attached elements moved to written notes:
  
  • No accidental before stem note; being moved to written note if not available.
  • No octave sign before stem note.
  • And signs of bow, stopped, fingering, open-string, harmonic, and thumb-position are moved from stem note to written note if not available.
  • Directions right before stem note on the other voice are also moved to right before written note.
• Supported option to show/hide music parenthesis.
• Rewrote to improve shown and hidden staff management. Now, shown and hidden staves are handled based on different transcription modes (single-part or full score) and the instrument types.
  
  • Single-part: for keyboard, accordion and organ: at least show one staff even all staves of that parallel are hidden. For other types like string, pluck instrument: at least one staff shown in a parallel even all are hidden. Otherwise, just ignore hidden and staves with only measure rests.
  • For full score: at least one parallel must have one part shown, even all parts are with hidden staves or staves with only measure rests. For keyboard, accordion and organ types: if a parallel with all staves with only measure rests, they are skipped. But if there’s an only one staff shown, it should be accompanied another staff as a pair of hands. For other types, just treat each staff in a part as an independent instrument. So, hidden staves or staves with measure rests are automatically ignored.
• Fixed: wrong supplement accidentals on other voice; handled supplement accidentals of ¼, ¾, double-sharp, flat-flat; loss of middle interval notes; lost fingering number as applying stem note; missing octave sign for first note in a parallel.
• SMB’s general features: supported soft hyphenation; allow to localize display table names; sent out language translation files to volunteers to help translate into Arabic (completely new), Italian and Spanish.

April 14^th, 2022

• Supported to combine multiple voices as chords whenever they have same length, same slur status and same articulations. Option is also added to turn it on or off.
• Removed unnecessary hairpin stop signs when hairpin stop is separated by rests.
• Partial and full measure repeats with dynamics is applied correctly.
• Repetition text is now placed at the same position on multiple staves.
• Now phrases at beginning of a voice, or between notes in a voice or at the end are correctly applied with dot 5 and space for specific situations.
• When phrase broke and written on new line, extra dot 5 and space are removed.
• Placed text direction in correct voice based on MusicXML voice tag or its location.
• Rewrote algorithm to handle partial in-accord for a measure with multiple hidden rests in different passages.
• Supported fermata barlines: normal, angled, squared, double-angled, double-squared, double-dot, half-curve and with inverted type.
• Fixes treated regular rests as hidden rests; wrong chord tie placement; missing hidden rests when applying partial accord for case when both voices having hidden rests; removed unnecessary music commas for chords in irregular beaming; moving articulations before written note instead of before intervals; not grouping notes when breaking its rhythm for partial accord; chord note without voice number now attached to other same chord note’s voice to avoid wrong stem sign applying; wrong supplement accidentals are correctly detected and sated; not note grouping in tuplet when having multiple hidden rests at the beginning; removed noteheads for hidden notes/rests; and many other minor improvements.
• SMB new features and improvements:
  
  • Table names are now localizable.
  • All new music Braille options are added into Options dialogue: restate key sign, show clef, show value distinction sign, show harmonic natural/artificial and thumb signs, options to apply doubling for harmonics, whether to add supplement accidentals, and combine voices into chords.
  • Detected BRF, BRL and PEF Braille page settings when opening and automatically applied that settings for the document instead of using global settings.
  • Fixes: showing blank page in SMB when meeting page break in BRF file, and wrong row/column values when exported to PEF.

March 24^th, 2022

• Improved small note grouping algorithm to correctly handle pickup and broken in-score measures.
• Translated thumb-position and enharmonic signs. Two new doubling options for natural and artificial harmonics were added. Thumb-position was also added to the show/hide symbols list.
• Supported to process hidden notes: appeared in chord and in different voice as hidden playing notes.
• Supported local key and time signatures. Added option whether to restate key signature at beginning of each parallel.
• Supported to state supplement accidental and the option whether to add was also added.
• Supported classical harmony analysis with Roman letters as well as other improvements for harmony and chord progressions.
• Supported partial and full measure repetition for fingering and accidental cases.
• Supported to translate time signature with dotted-note symbol.
• And other miscellaneous improvements: no wavy-line with dots 26-2356 for note with trill-mark; fixed unnecessary added rests in Fantasia score example; added show/hide clef sign option; fixed hidden rest missing issues when translating with partial and stem sign in-accord mode for some cases; placed direction in its correct voice; improved the duration calculation to correctly determine pickup measure; fixed line breaks in full score translation mode and alignment for bar-over-bar format method.
• Score info dialogue: able to input and save custom Braille staff and part names; fixed issue of translating as question mark.