I’ve searched this forum and read the Guide for Song Notes, but cannot definitively find the answer to this question (Forum is hard to search with word “Notes”!). I cannot find a way to do it… Can a Song Notes Window be separated from the main Cantabile screen to display on a second monitor?
Instead of having a laptop in front of keyboard, my plan was to run a dual monitor setup with a smaller, unobtrusive 12" widescreen monitor positioned right above the keyboard to stealthy show important points for each song as entered in the Song Notes. That leaves the bigger screen to the side and out of the way showing the routings, lists, etc… With the small monitor, it’s not so bad to see the notes as it is with a cloned dual monitor setup; however, this Song Notes information is very helpful and would be great to display at all times, no matter what is going on in the main window.
The Song Notes window is a fixed part of Cantabile and can’t be detached. But if you want to display stuff on a second screen (or even on a separate Windows tablet), you could give LivePrompter a try. It is a specialized teleprompter app for musicians that can be synced with Cantabile via MIDI so you can use it to display lyrics or any other useful info along with your Cantabile songs.
The Web UI seems to work very well and was very easy. All my Cantabile notes can now be anywhere. Is there a way to modify what is shown on the Web UI? I have no need for the play/pause/stop buttons or the File Name/TimeSignature/BPM tickers on top and bottom. I could utilize that space with more Notes.
I’ve been thinking of editing the HTML for just show notes. Just took a look - doesn’t look like it will be difficult to remove the setlist and states elements.
I’m looking at it, too (HTML looks like cuneiform at the moment!). That would be nice and simple to show the SHOW NOTES window only and leave out the transport, files names, hot buttons, etc. to utilize the entire screen for just notes.
For those playing with the html… if you’re making changes that you think might be useful to everyone try to make them in such a way that the current functionality doesn’t get broken. ie: Instead of modifying index.html directly, create a copy in the same folder and rename it to something useful such as “shownotes.html”. You can then access it via http://localhost:35007/shownotes
If you’ve come up with something you’d like included in future builds, submit a pull request to the themes repo and I’ll consider merging it in.
If “submitting pull requests to repos” is foreign speak to you and the changes are simply files to be added to the folder, email them to me and I’ll check it out.
My “military grade” hardening of Win10 prevented connections to my recording desktop I wanted to use as the server. We use Webroot for one of the security layers. I think it was preventing connection even though I added exceptions in it.
I built a new Win10 machine today that works fine so tonight I’ll create shownotes.html
I finally had time today to see what’s involved in making shownotes full screen. The following isn’t what I would qualify as a helpsheet. I could make one with screenshots and links to the tools I used. This is just a quick overview.
There is a file in the Cantabile program folder called root.webfolder. Inside it are the files that make up what one might call the website for the Cantabile Network Server (Cantabile webserver).
It’s actually an “archive” (better known as zip) file I believe created with 7zip.
What I did was:
Use 7zip to extract the file root.webfolder to a folder which will be named Root.
Move the root.webfolder file out of the Cantabile Program folder
Rename the new “Root” folder (created by extracting root.webfolder file with 7zip) to root.webfolder
I then made edits to the shownotes.css (style sheets are used to control fonts, spacing, and other appearance related items on webpages) file so the footer is 5 pixels high and adjusted “margins” (padding, height etc) so the notes take up all but a tiny bit of the screen. If you look carefully you can see the flattened out left and right buttons in the footer. I put in screenshots of VB3 1.4 with my settings for “Us and Them” and YouTube keyboard shortcuts just for example.
Address in my web browser:
http://192.168.1.46:35007/shownotes.html#/notes
One last note - every time you save changes to the shownotes.html or styles_shownotes.css I hold Ctrl and tap F5 to force a refresh in the browser. Also you need to open the editor you use (again I used Notepad ++) as administrator (right click on the shortcut and chose run as administrator). That’s because the folders are under Program Files - windows is trying to protect changes to them by requiring you to do that.
I had to copy Root.webfolder out of TopTen/Cantable folder because win10 is garbage…but that’s another, much longer, thread…
So I believe I’ve successfully done everything up to set 8. I’m omitting 8 because it’s looks like tweaking and I’m just trying to get this plane off the ground. All your steps were concise and able to follow.
Now I have an uncompressed folder named “WebFolder.Root” on C: with all the changes (Steps 1-7, above). I assume this has to be recompressed and copied back into the Cantabile folder. How would this be done with 7zip? I assume highlight the “WebFolder.Root”, Right Click and use 7zip in explorer menu to compress to “something”, then change the name to something, then copy back into cantabile folder. Please explain as I don’t want to get something wrong and get really confused.
It works without putting it back in the compressed folder. I noticed I had a “typo” in step 2 I just fixed. The folder needs to be named root.webfolder not webfolder.root.
If you have it named right it will work out of the “real” folder.
Good question about “recompiling” it. That was my next thing to figure out. When I examined the original root.webfolder I noticed only some files were compressed. Maybe someone who has built a theme can explain. I have installed git but not make which is new to me.
I think you can safely use it with the actual folder root.webfolder instead of the file root.webfolder
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of Win10 prevented connections to my recording desktop I wanted to use as the server. We use Webroot for one of the security layers. I think it was preventing connection even though I added exceptions in it.