Music Composer

Viewfinders and visualisers

Viewfinders

A viewfinder is a window you edit in. Open another with New viewfinder, from the viewfinders menu in the toolbar or the canvas's right-click menu, to see two places in the piece at once, each at its own zoom, lanes and theme. Auto-scroll with playback makes a viewfinder follow the playhead; while the piece plays, Auto-scroll in the bar above the keyboard does the same for the main canvas. Viewfinders aren't saved with the piece: this browser remembers them for each composition.

Visualisers

A visualiser is a way of showing the piece while it plays, and exporting it as a video. Visualisers are saved with the interpretation. Make one with New 2D visualiser or New 3D visualiser.

Each has its own design, camera and effects, the bars it shows, and markers such as bar lines, bar numbers and section labels. Save frame exports a still.

Themes

The Appearance panel contains colour themes for the notes. Randomise tries new colours for the ones you haven't locked, and By pitch colours each note by its pitch class, so every C is alike. Right-click a theme to use, duplicate or delete it, and drag it onto another to reorder them.

Under System appearance, Light mode and Dark mode each give a theme to that mode of your system: the piece follows the system as it switches, for you and for anyone you share it with. A mode left at Not set shows the theme you picked. While a mode has a theme, picking another theme replaces it for that mode.

On an HDR screen, a note colour's picker has an HDR field: how far past white those notes go on the canvas, in stops, each a doubling of brightness. Double-click the field to set it back to 0. The background, foreground, accent, highlight and keyboard colours take no gain. Showing HDR needs a browser with WebGPU; elsewhere a gain is kept, its field greyed out, and the notes stop at white. Below it, Range is the theme's HDR range, how far past white its notes go (+3 stops by default): no gain goes past it, and on a screen with less headroom the canvas scales the gains down by the share of the range the screen can show rather than clipping them, once the browser reports the screen's headroom (see Paint's HDR). Floating views, visualisers and exports draw every colour at its base.