A summary of new features on Patantara released recently.

Sri Vaidheeswaran’s poetry composed for Sarali varisai

Ok this is not a “feature” per se, but something we consider a cultural milestone. Music & Language : Tamizhin Isai Sarali Varisai presents text and audio of poetry composed by Sri Vaidheeswaran which has been sung and performed on the Vina by Dr. Karaikudi S. Subramanian of Brhaddhvani - Research and Training Centre for Musics of the World. See the announcement by Brhaddhvani.

Please do support the work of Brhaddhvani through contributions via their RazorPay account https://rzp.io/rzp/brhaddhvani .

Towards this, we’ve made available the ability to present a notation page using a “theme”. This is work in progress and is not broadly available just yet. We’re looking to support student designers interested in contributing one or more themes aligned with the design aesthetics of South Indian traditions for modest compensation. If you’re one, please get in touch with us mentioning “Theme design for patantara” in the subject.

While we intend to own rights to the themes since we’ll compensate for them, we’re happy to provide attribution to the designer(s).

New Features

Now for the features. We’ll use screenshots from the Sarali page to illustrate basic changes and features.

1. The new player features “presets” for ease of playing back entire sections of a document, “enter and leave markers” to control when playback “enters” or “leaves” a line and “atoms” for assistance when a student wants to work with phrases.

   See The New Player - Presets, Atoms and Markers for details.

2. Document authors can now use SSP gamaka symbols in their documents. These are just for notation presentation purposes and do not affect playback or the audio in any way. Currently, we support a subset of the symbols and some combinations of them.

3. If you are an author of a document or have been marked as an editor, you can now record audio tracks for your document directly within Patantara instead of bringing in a recorded mp3 file and explicitly marking the correspondence between the lines and the mp3 file. All the player facilities including tala, looping (i.e. multiple takes with “keep the latest”) and shruthi are available when recording.

4. Full support for phone profile devices! Patantara was originally designed for the desktop browser and so provided poor to no support for phones, except when they’re used like desktop browsers. Now all notation pages are comfortable to use on phones, complete with auto-scrolling lines and bouncing baton for hints. This took a lot of work, so we appreciate any feedback.

   Caveat: Recording is also “supported” on phones, though it is not well tested on phone profiles at the moment. Stay tuned.

We’ll be posting documentation for each of these aspects in due course. Have fun exploring the features in the meanwhile.