Where?

Where do I find it in Bounce Metronome:

The 2D and 3D bounce windows, and use the drop lists of options in those windows to choose what to bounce, bounce patterns etc.

You find the windows you use to configure it in detail in the Visuals drop menu.

Patterns

Depending on the rhythm and circumstances you may want the balls to bounce in different ways.

So there's support for:

• Back and forth
• Left to right (or right to left) and bounce back on the last beat (alternatively on first beat)
• Bounce inside ovals - especially useful for swing or polyrhythms. Alternatively Bounce outside ovals.
• Bounce in conducting patterns. These are good when you are reading from music or can only give the bounce momentary attention. They show the rhythm very clearly even with just a quick glimpse out of the corner of your eye.

The conducting patterns feature needs a page to itself so see Conducting Patterns for this.

Splash & Shadow

The splash and shadow effects help you to see the exact moment of the beat and so help you to play more exactly in time.

Either effect can be switched on or off and you can configure the colours, the size of the splash and so on.

Movies

This is a feature that lets you play any movies and other animations together with the bouncing balls. So far its without sound but later will add an option to play movies with sound and to synchronise the bounce with the sound.

Movies in the sky, sea or as bounce texture

The most usual place for your animations is in the sky behind the bouncing balls. But you can also use any animations you like for the sea, and for the bouncing balls texture.

Since the bouncing balls can be hard to see against some movies, there's an option to auto fade the movie to any desired background colour. This reduces the contrast to make the bouncing balls easier to pick out in front of the movie.

Which movies can I play?

Most movie formats can be imported and shown in Bounce Metronome in this way. It depends on the video codecs installed on your machine and sometimes you may need to convert it from one format to another in an external tool (such as Any Video Converter for instance) before Bounce Metronome can import it.

Sub titles

Some musicians who work with Bounce Metronome like to show actual long movies with sub-titles behind the bouncing balls as they practise. So the feature includes sub-title support.

Sound

At the moment the movies are played silently. Later I hope to add a feature to let you play movies with sound and to synchronise the bounces with the sound by hand - which could be useful if you want to practise along with e.g. a movie of your favourite band playing your tune.

2D and 3D

Some musicians prefer the visuals in 2D and some prefer them in 3D. There are separate windows for each so you can show one or the other or both as you prefer.

2D shapes in 3D

There's a 2D shapes option for the 3D window as well, shows 2D shapes, though bouncing in 3D.

Shapes & Sprites

You have many ways to show the bouncing balls, as different shapes, as images, and as text.

Shapes

The disks, stars and polygons give variations in the visual appearance. The stars and polygons can be set to tumble in time with the rhythm and land on points (or land on the edges) or tumble at a fixed tempo.

Sprite

Also, Bounce Metronome comes with a collection of sprites to get you started. and has an installer with some extra sprites including Sorlo a funny sorcerer, on the Extra Downloads page. You can also easily modify the images available in the big public collections of shared sprites online - by modifying the background colour to be different from any colour in the image itself.

To use the sprites, choose Sprites in the drop list in any of the Bounce windows, then select which sprite you want to display using the 2D or 3D Sprite windows available in the Visuals drop menu:

2D Bounce - Images or Animations - for Sky and Bouncing Balls (Ctrl + 236) or 3D Bouncing Balls - Image or Animation (Ctrl + 239)

Unicode Symbols

The default is to use dingbats. These are printer ornaments used for typesetting, and many of them are symmetrical and well suited for a bouncing symbol. Wikipedia article on dingbats.

Numbers, words or lyrics

Or use beat numbers or number words to count the beats. For more about this see Beat and Sub-beat counts.

You can also show bouncing lyrics for a song. Or any words you like to see bouncing in time with the rhythm.

Two styles at once.

You can also have two styles of bouncing ball at once, with some parts picked out in one way (say as beat numbers) and some in another way (say as bouncing shapes).