Google Summer of Code 2013

I realize it's rather late in the game for me to finally suggest some ideas, and I apologize for not following through sooner. But if any students are interested, here are some things I think might make decent projects. Should I add these to the main "ideas" page, or wait to see if there is any sort of consensus that these are worth adding? I don't know the code well enough (basically, not at all) to be a primary mentor myself, but I would certainly be willing to be a secondary resource for concepts, usability, etc.

1) Playback of slurs (and other markings)

MuseScore currently plays back a number of markings, but it makes no effort to play slurs, and this significantly limits the realism of playback for wind and stringed instruments. Implementing this could potentially be as simple as having MuseScore sending appropriate MIDI controller messages. But it is possible the synthesizer backend and/or sooundfonts still would not support this, in which case you would have to dig in deeper. Similarly, playback of hairpins (crescendo and diminuendo) also requires use of MIDI controller messages in order to affect single notes - here, there is every reason to assume this would work with no additional backend support. There may also be a few other markings that currently do not playback but could be supported more easily just through adjustments to note velocity, duration, etc.

2) MIDI out and/or VSTi playback

Rather rely on MuseScore's built in synthesizer feature, the ability for it to control other synthesizers - including virtual ones - would open the doors to further playback improvements. This would probably require fairly signifiant work and knowledge of real time programming techniques.

3) Slash notation

Jazz and pop music makes use of "slash notation" - diagonal slashes one per beat used to indicate a measure is open for improvisation, also notes with slash heads used to ondicate specific rhythms to be played with user-chosen pitches. MuseScore can create this type of notation, but it is not ideal - they are just ordinary notes with the note heads and perhaps stems changed. This means they are affected by transposition, which they should not be. This project would have you implement a "true" slash notation that was immune to transposition. A quick-and-dirty way to implement this would be to simply add a "do not transpose" flag to notes the user could set when creating slash notation the current way (via a plugin that alters note properties of ordinary notes to produce the appearance of slash notation). The "better" way is to implement native support for slash notation, ideally using a mechanism similarly to however MusicXML defines this to work.

4) User control over copy & paste

A very common user request is to allow the user to control what gets copied in a copy/paste operation. Currently, it is always notes, chords, articulations, and lyrics only (?), but often, people might want to specify that text is also copied, or note properties, or that chords or lyrics are *not* copied, etc. A "special copy" operation that displayed a dialog with a series of checkboxes allowing the user to select what gets copied would be one approach to solving this.