Minuet: intervals, chords, and scales exercises

Hi planet,

Exactly one month ago I blogged about a new KDE application for music education named Minuet. Since it was only a few days until featuring freezing KDE Applications 15.12 at that time, we postponed the first release of Minuet to 16.04. The plan is to move it in a couple weeks to KDE review and make the final adjustments for having our newly KDE-Edu baby out in the wild.

That said, some nice new features have been added to Minuet in the meanwhile:

• Ear training exercises can now be specified in separate JSON files. That's of paramount importance for easily identifying and evolving the large set of exercises we intent to support. Minuet's core takes care of loading all exercise specification files and merging them in a single JSON model, used by the dynamic QML stuff which creates the exercise menu and presentation grid.
• A system verification wizard was implemented to detect the availability of commonly used MIDI backends like TiMidity++. TiMidity++ is automatically started and stopped during Minuet initialization and shutdown, respectively.
• Exercise answers are automatically highlighted in piano keyboard when hovering the answer's options.
• Initial support for exercises regarding chords (11 exercises with 19 different chord types) and scales (currently only major scale and its modes) has been added.
• Descending melodic intervals exercises have been included, in addition to the ascending ones.
• A KConfig-based UI for initial MIDI configuration has been implemented.
• Major refactoring in QML source code.

Well, nothing better than checking out a demonstration video, isn't it?

So, what can you expect for the next steps?

• Sheet music support;
• Indicators and metrics for student achievements;
• More ear training lessons.

You already know it ;) but it doesn't hurt to remind: comments, suggestions, and of course contributions are quite welcome! Just clone it from git://anongit.kde.org/minuet.

See you ...