Re: [Denemo-devel] Breve and Denemo's understanding of durations greater than whole note.

[Richard Shann]

On Mon, 2010-10-18 at 20:07 +0200, Nils Gey wrote:
> Except that all normal Denemo notes get a whole-note shape afterwards.
> If we think of doing tuplets with SetDurationInTicks this could be
> confusing :)

There is an important conceptual misunderstanding hiding here:
d-SetDurationInTicks applied to a note/chord will turn that into a
special note/chord: it has many note/chord properties such as note
names, octave, tied ... but it is a special note, not a normal note.

In particular if you give the duration 384 to a note (which is the
pulses per quarter note PPQN built in to Denemo) the note does *not*
become a quarter note, it remains a special note. This has to be so, it
could be some tupletted half-note or any other note with that duration.
So we could not impose a meaning on it without breaking something
somewhere, sometime. We could write scripts to transform such special
notes into the obvious normal note of the same duration, but perhaps
that won't be useful.

What such special notes *are* useful for is creating things like Breve
(until the day when someone is inspired to work on built-in notes like
that) and other objects with note properties but otherwise unusual
durations, e.g. plain chant neumes.

I hope this will lessen the chance of confusion - the confusion will
mostly stay on the scripter's side of the great divide between
programmers and users:)

Richard