Rainbow Notes: Help

Click on any of the small buttons marked R, O, Y, G, B, I, V (for red, orange, yellow, ... Duh!) or press the corresponding key to select a sound type. Put notes on the sheet by placing the cursor where you want the main "dot" to be and press 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 or 8 for the appropriate length of the note in 1/8 units. Hold down the CTRL key if you want the note to be raised half a step.

All notes can be dragged up or down (keep this in mind -- it makes things a whole lot easier). They will vanish if you drag them off the sheet, or if you place the cursor over them and press delete. A whole bar can be cleared at once with the c key. The applet inserts pause marks at appropriate places and makes sure you don't do anything illegal. You are not allowed to play more than one note of the same color at once.

When you want to hear the result, click on the Make button. The applet will then compile the melody (which takes a few seconds -- you should be able to see the progress in the status bar at the bottom of your browser window) and play it from beginning to end. Once it's been compiled, you can play it without having to go through the computational process again if you just click on Play, but whenever you have made some changes (or if you just want to play it at a different speed) you need to click on Make again in order to hear the new version.

If you just want to hear how a single note at the current cursor position would sound, press p (and hold down SHIFT to get the note note raised half a step).

I assume I don't need to explain the use of the Load and Clear buttons. To switch to 3/4 or 4/4, you need to clear the sheet first.

Advanced features

The little "Waveform" and "Envelope" areas aren't just there to show what the different voices sound like. You can edit them by clicking and dragging. Want a softer sound? Draw a smoother waveform. Want to tone down the volume? Lower the height of the envelope curve. Experiment! You can always get the original shapes back by clicking Reset.

You will notice that when you flip between voices, the envelope or waveform changes you make usually won't look exactly the same when you get back. That's because different browsers will assign differently sized drawing areas to these graphs, so it wasn't possible to find a curve data representation with a one-to-one correspondence to what you see on your screen. The applet consequently stores an approximation of what you've drawn, which will turn out slightly different when it shows up again.

When you "save" the finished melody, you don't get the result as a file (since that would violate the security restrictions of Java). You get a bunch of odd characters in the "Java Console" window. (Look under "Options" in Netscape.) Copy all of it into whatever text editor you've got and save it from there.

How to use the saved files

The resulting text file can be read by a particular melody object I've created, which can be included in applets and used in place of AudioClip objects. The Melody .class file is here and the source code is here.

For the source code of a very simple test applet using the Melody class, go here.