July 2024 Update

Update Video

What’s changed?

Designers can now import MusicXML and audio files to design their show off of.

New Features

• MusicXML files (uncompressed) can be imported and their measures parsed into OpenMarch
• Multiple audio files can be imported and selected from to use during playback
• The timeline now has measures, in addition to pages
  • With this, you can align pages to the measures’ rhythms
• Measures can be edited

The relationship between measures and pages

Before this month, pages defined the tempo of the show and played the role of measures. Now, measures are a separate entity that pages are aligned to. This to align with the idea that drill writers will design drill with a set amount of music already.

Drill writers shouldn’t be worried about maintaining music structure. It should be defined at the point of starting the design and easily built on top of.

Pages

• Define where marchers should be located at each point in the show
• Contain an amount of “counts” that defines how many steps the marcher needs to take to get to that page
• Can span multiple measures or even partial measures
• Can be edited often

Measures

• The tempo and time signature information of the music the show is based off of
• The “beat unit” can be changed to define what beat value the marcher steps on
  • E.g. “Quarter note = 120” vs. “Half note = 60”
• Can be edited when needed, but likely won’t be

Goals accomplished this month

Ehhh nothing really got finished, but we’re close!

Must haves -

• Finish music implementation
  • Importing musicXML files
  • Aligning the pages with the measures
    • Pages will no longer hold their own tempo. They will be calculated at runtime based on the measures
  • Importing music file and making sure it plays correctly
• Clean up the timeline and make it more practical
• Making continuous animation (not just stopping at each page)

Nice to haves -

• UI for creating your own measures. Right now it’s just MusicXML import
  • Didn’t get to this, but this would be very useful for non-music based shows

Plans for August

I think now it’s important to get into bug fixing mode. Once we get to August, OpenMarch should be much more mature.

Must haves -

• Start testing things in electron
  • Database entries
  • History table
• Start E2E or integration testing
  • Getting things from the UI into the database
  • Make sure the canvas is rendering correctly
• Fix bugs/issues that have built up in the repo

Remember, you can always check the GitHub project to see what current issues are in the queue.