User Interface

Opening and Saving

Jampea stores music in MID files. The MIDI format is a format for describing musical pieces digitally. It contains commands for a musician (or software like Jampea), which must be followed in order to play that piece.

There are audio formats like MP3 or WAV, which are recordings of actual sounds. You can easily record human speech as an MP3, but you can't write down human speech into a MIDI file. You can think of MP3 as a "raster format" for sound, while MIDI is a "vector format" (which needs to be "rasterized" by a musician or software like Jampea so that we can hear the actual sound).

Press File - Open to open an existing MID file, or File - New, to create a new file. For a new file, you need to choose the BPM value (beats per minute) and the time signature (beats per measure, 3/4 for 3 beats, 4/4 for four beats). To save your work, press File - Save as MID.

When you open a document in Jampea, you can see three rulers. The ruler at the top shows you the number of each measure (1, 2, 3, ...). The ruler at the bottom shows you the time (in seconds) where each measure starts. The "ruler" on the left is simply a piano keyboard, which tells you the pitch of each vertical location.

Layers

All events of our music are located inside layers, which you can see in a sidebar on the right side. Each layer has its own musical instrument and a volume setting. You can delete layers, create new layers, duplicate layers, and so on.

When you set the layer instrument to Percussions (drums), piano keys do not refer to pitches anymore but to various drum sounds.

There are a few special kinds of layers, which are not instruments: Tempo layers allow you to change the BPM value during the song, Time Signature layers allow you to change the time signature during the song, and Text layers allow you to add "text marks" (e.g., comments or lyrics) into the song.

Tools

The Move tool allows you to select and move the events of a current layer (vertically to move in pitch, horizontally to move in time). It can also resize events by dragging the right side of a rectangle.

Each event (e.g., each musical tone or each drum hit) has its own volume (also called the Velocity). If you select one or more events, you can set their Velocity and other parameters at the top of the screen.

The Brush tool allows you to "paint" new events into a layer. Simply click and drag to create a new event (e.g., the C#3 tone played by a piano, which is one beat wide).

The Hand tool can be used to drag our "canvas" up and down, because for long pieces, all the events will not fit on our screen. You can use the Zoom tool to zoom in and out at specific places of your piece.

Playing your music

There is the Play button at the top left corner of Jampea. After clicking it, the canvas will start moving. You will see a green line on your screen, and events are played when they touch this line. When it finishes playing the last measure, it will start again from the beginning. Press the same button to pause.

Useful Shortcuts

Press Spacebar to temporarily switch to the Hand tool (to move the canvas) - after releasing it, you will be switched back to the previous tool. Similarly, press Ctrl+Spacebar to switch to the Zoom tool (it will be zooming in; add Alt to zoom out).

If you click and drag the top or the bottom ruler (no matter what tool is active), it will move the canvas left and right. It works even while playing your piece.

To select the Move tool, press V. To select the Brush tool, press B on your keyboard. If you are using the Brush tool, holding the Ctrl key will temporarily activate the Move tool.

Pressing Up and Down on your keyboard will move selected events a semitone up and down (add Shift to move an octave up and down). Pressing Left and Right will move the selected events left and right by a small bit (add Shift to move by a whole beat).