New alphaTab Website!

After a lot of hours of work the new website is online!

We cleaned up the interface, created a new demo-video and added some really cool stuff to the site:

Home

On the home screen you can find a slider giving the visitors a small summary about alphaTab. At the page center there is a lot of information about our activities. The left hand side shows the commits we made to our GitHub repository. The right hand side shows the most recent blog posts.

Get It

This is the new download section of alphaTab. It did not change much but in general: Pages look more clean than before ;)

Docs

The documentation sites have a brand new structure. We already created the structure, but there’s still much work to do on the contents. The most sections are still empty but as we already have the structure, the creation of contents will get easier. We published the new site even in the lack of the documentation because this way you get the comfort of all the other changes. (and the old documentation was quite out-of-date anyway ;) )

Demo

We integrated the demo site into the main website for easier access. Additionally you can comment on each sample if you have got any questions.

Bugs

Of course there’s lot of work to do on alphaTab and there are still bugs in it. Found a bug, want to request a feature or simply want to give a praise? This is the section you can do that.

Blog

Erm, yes…  the blog of this site. Here you find all news about alphaTab.

 

We hope you like alphaTab and it’s new website.

 

Cheers
The alphaTab Team

Ties for Score Staves and Hideable Song Infos

Tonight is a good night: Two more features come along

Ties for Score Staves

In this improvement the score staves starts to render ties for HammerOn/PullOff and Slides:

Hideable Song Infos

The PageViewLayout now accepts a property hideSongInfo which does exactly what it says. The song infos rendered on the top of a tablature will not get rendered if this setting is set to true.

$('div.alphaTabPage2').alphaTab({file: f, layout: {
    mode: "page",
    measuresPerLine: 5,
    hideSongInfo: true
}});

New Feature: Layout Configuration

TeBe asked for a feature to specify how many measures are placed per line and now it’s done!

Now you can specify which layout manager and settings should be used:

// default layout manager (page layout)
$('div.alphaTabDefault').alphaTab({file: f});
// horizontal layout manager
$('div.alphaTabHorizontal').alphaTab({file: f, layout: "horizontal"});
// page layout with 5 measures per line
$('div.alphaTabPage2').alphaTab({file: f, layout: {
    mode: "page", // <- optional (default: page)
    measuresPerLine: 5
}});

Live Demo

Stave Configurations and Rhythm Notation

After some hours developing a new feature is now available: rhythm notation for tablatures.

Stave Configurations

It was necessary to create a configuration system which allows to specify settings for staves like tablature or score.

You can use the old/simple syntax (array declaration) if you don’t want to specify any settings:

// simple configuration
$('div.alphaTabSimple').alphaTab({staves: ["score", "tablature"]});

The new/extended syntax (json object) allows you to specify additional settings for the staves:

// extended configuration
$('div.alphaTabSimple').alphaTab({
    staves: {
        score: {},
        tablature: {rhythm: true}
    }
});

Rhythm Notation

You can enable on the tablature stave as you set the rhythm Option to true:

$('div.alphaTabRhythm').alphaTab({
    staves: {
        tablature: {rhythm: true}
    }
});

This configuration will result in this:

Hope you have fun with this new feature.

- Daniel

Delays

Hi alphaTab Users!

I have got some bad news for you. Because of my studies and my current courseworks, I do not have much time to develop on alphaTab. I want to tell you that I will continue developing on alphaTab as soon as I have got the time. I do not want you to think that alphaTab is a dead project :)

Just keep visiting our site to get informed as the development continues. ;)

- Daniel

We are on GitHub!

Awesome news to all developers!

alphaTab is now hosted on GitHub! Git as a distributed version control system allows you to easily develop on alphaTab without need of the write-permission to the main repository. You can simply create a fork (your own clone) of the source code and develop on this fork. As soon as you made any changes you can send us a pull request to send us your changes.

Repository: https://github.com/CoderLine/alphaTab

Displaced Note Heads

There is another really cool new feature in alphaTab which I forgot to mention in the last post:

displaced note heads / automatic note head positioning

You might know the problem if two note heads are to close together: You can hardly identify which notes are set. In the next release alphaTab will support automatic positioning of note heads, also known as “displaced note heads”.

Check it out:

Greetings
Daniel

Upcoming Features!

Hi Everybody.

It has been a long time since the last alphaTab update was released. Because I am studying it is hard to find enough time for extending alphaTab.
The first step for new features is done:

completely rewritten render engine

Some of you might know that the old render and layout engine was based on TuxGuitar, a great OpenSource GuitarPro alternative written in Java. This engine for layouting and drawing was optimized to enable editing within the tablature. Because of this, the engine is very complex and there are a lot of cross-code dependencies. I have a complete new render and layout engine by only using some base ideas from the previous engine. (i.E. Key Signature handling). This engine allows easier extending and provides some great new features. The look&feel of the tablature did not change much, but the code-behind is a completely new one.

hideable staves

A really cool new feature is the separation of staves. In the previous engine tablature and standard-notation were handled as one. The new engine can handle multiple different staves. Currently there are two implementations:

The TablatureStave implements the rendering of guitar tablatures. The ScoreStave implements the rendering of standard notation.

This new system allows showing/hiding staves as needed. If you want to render piano sheets you are not interest into showing tablatures and this feature allows this.

alphaTab 0.2 RC2

Finally it’s done: The second release candidate of alphaTab 0.2 is available!

Our release notes:

alphaTab 0.2RC2
- [New] Rendering of Percussion Tabs (Guitar Pro 5 Style)
- [New] Rendering Guitar Tuning on Page Start
- [New] Minimal Support For Guitar Pro 6 Files
- [New] Instrument support for alphaTex
- [Improved] Completed Music Symbols
- [Improved] Coding Styleguide
- [Improved] Rendering Performance
- [Changed] VBScript Loader instead of Flash Loader (IE)
- [Fixed] KeySignatures in alphaTex
- [Fixed] KeySignatures in alphaTex
- [Fixed] GuitarPro File Reader Corrected
- [Fixed] Several minor bugs

Head over to the download section to get your free copy.