Swapped track order

[Peej]

Not exactly related, but as far as choosing between You Play and automatically played, in the few 2-hand piano tracks I've tried, the right-hand track is most often (or always?) on the left-hand side (and vice versa).

Probably it's only because they're labeled as "track 1" and "track 2", but since they're side by side, it's a little confusing.

Of course, once you have sheet music view, you'll just show us a 2-measure preview of each track on that screen, and then it'll be totally obvious which is which, right?

[Nicholas]

I think this one is important enough to split off into it's own topic. (And that was a cute reference to the sheet music display. )

So, your analysis is absolutely correct. The melody (which is usually the right-hand part) is generally the first track in a MIDI. Of course, the tracks are laid out in typical English reading order (left-to-right, top-to-bottom). So in nearly every single case the right-hand part is on the left and vice versa.

A friend suggested a while ago that the tracks be sorted by average pitch. I agreed that sounded like a good solution. I even considered switching away from English reading order to something where every track in the left column will have average pitches lower than every track in the next column, etc. That way the melody should always be near the middle, leaning to the right hand side. (The only weird cases are percussive tracks because the notes in those are extremely varied. I could just force percussive tracks to one side, probably the left.)

In fact, because this was just a minor change and I didn't want to crowd the feature list, this was already scheduled to be in 0.6.2 when it's released. There are about a dozen other changes about that size going in that I didn't list either. In retrospect, my list should probably be exhaustive.