Mikä on uutta

A chord written for both hands is graded the way you play it. Where one staff holds more notes than a hand can span, like the crossing thirds in Mozart's A major sonata or the tenor and bass of a hymn written on one line, the grade read them as a single impossible stretch. When your other hand is free to take those notes, the grade now counts them as shared between your hands. Seventy-five pieces sit a grade or two easier for it, and no piece's own grade went up. The easier ways into a piece, like the melody alone, are measured afresh too, so a few pieces now start a grade higher or lower, and none offers a way in that is no easier than the piece itself.

A slide that lands on a chord goes on from it. Where a slide arrives on one note of a chord and the next sets off from another note of the same chord, Listen could drop the second slide and simply strike its notes. Both slides now sound, one arriving and the next leaving, whichever way round the chord is written.

A note written twice in a chord takes one finger. Where two voices share a note, as they often do in hymns and part-songs, the suggested fingering counted it as two keys and could stretch your hand for a key it had already taken: an octave with its top note doubled came out as 3-1-4. Both copies now share one finger, and the rest of the chord is fingered the way your hand actually plays it.

Two slides at once each land on their own note. Where both hands glide across the keys together, Listen swept only one of them, and could send it to the other hand's note instead, the right hand diving into the bass. Each slide now runs from its own note to the one it is written to reach, both hands together. A slide that lands on a note and sets straight off again from it, up and back down, now plays both halves too, where it used to drop one.

Listen shakes both hands' tremolos. Where both hands write a tremolo on the same beat, as a piano reduction of an orchestra often does, Listen shook the right hand and struck the left once. Both now shimmer together, each at the speed its own slashes ask for.

Switching a reading aid while a piece plays leaves no stray highlight. Turning note colours or finger numbers on or off during Listen, or while a take replayed, left the note sounding at that moment lit as if it still were, long after the music had moved on. The highlight now carries on with the music and the trail stays unbroken.

Back after a rest takes back only the rest. Writing notes one at a time, a Back pressed after a rest also removed the note before it, and two rests in a row went with the note too. Back now undoes exactly the last thing you entered, a note, a chord or a rest, and leaves the cursor where it began.

Compose shows the time a loaded piece is really in. Opening a file with five, seven or twelve beats to the bar wrote its bars out that way, while the Time menu read 2/4 — and picking 2/4 from it did nothing. The menu now lists the piece's own time beside the usual four, and keeps it there after you pick another, so a wrong pick can be put back.

Grades line up with the teaching books. Each grade is measured against well-known teaching collections — Anna Magdalena, Burgmüller, the two-part inventions and more. With chords now fingered by their pitches, every piece was measured again and the grades were re-cut against those books. About five hundred pieces sit at a new grade, most of them one step up and some one step down; nothing about how you play them changes.

A missing page speaks your language. Following a stale or mistyped link, or landing on a page that stopped working, used to show a page in English whatever language the rest of the site was in. It now speaks yours, with a way home and the same way to report the problem.

The first link on every page is named in your language. A screen reader announced the logo's link home in English on every page, in the middle of a French or Japanese one. It now reads in the language of the page.

A glossary link without a language opens the glossary. An address like plinky.fun/glossary/piano/, typed by hand or copied without its language, opened the free-play keyboard instead of the entry for the piano mark. It now opens the entry, in your language.

Scale names follow your note names everywhere. Switching how notes are named in Settings, H or B, do re mi or letters, renamed the scales on the keys and in Music, while Today, Stats and the review session kept the old names until you reloaded. They now change with the rest.

Slurs in songs land on the right hand again. In a song for voice and piano, the singer's line is left off the page, and every slur the piano's music carries was moving one staff down: the tune under a slur played detached, while a staccato bass under it was held long, in Listen and in what a run asked of you. Each slur now stays on the staff it is drawn on, with the singer on the page or off it.

A tremolo shakes only its own note. When a piano's right hand had a tremolo and the other hand, or a singer, had a note at the same moment, Listen shook that note too, over and over, even a singer's note that wasn't on the page. Now the other note sounds once while the tremolo shakes. A glissando also ends where its own part says, never on a note the singer slides to.

The piano follows its own dynamics in a song. Where the singer was marked quieter or louder than the piano, or had a crescendo the piano didn't, Listen played the piano at the singer's level, and a run asked you for it too. The piano now keeps to the dynamics and pedalling written for it.

Stopping a duet stops the other hand. While Plinky played the other hand for you, pressing Stop, leaving full screen or starting Listen left the notes it had lined up still playing, one after another, on a page where nothing was running, and under Listen they came out of step with it. Stopping now silences the other hand at once. Play a run to its end and the other hand still finishes the piece.

Stop means stop in a play-along too. Pressing Stop while keeping up with the beat left the guide notes and the other hand ringing for their whole length, so a slow chord could carry on over the next count-in. They now fade the moment you stop, while a run you play to its end still lets its last notes ring.

Finishing a piece plays its little flourish again. The short chime for reaching the end of a piece waits a moment before it sounds, and leaving full screen at the end of a run cut it off before it began. It now plays over your grade, and the last notes of the piece ring out with it.

The notes you take longest to find are timed honestly after Keep going. When you couldn't find a note and played the next one to move on, that next note was filed as found in no time at all, so the notes you stumble around most looked like your quickest. It now counts the whole time you spent getting there.

Find your level reads every note. With Thin the texture set in Settings, the placement test was thinned too: the melody alone, or just the melody and bass. You could climb past drills you couldn't yet read as written, and the level it saved came out too high. The test now always sets each drill in full.

Finger numbers sit the right way up on every chord. Some scores write a chord's notes from the top down, and on those the suggested fingering came out upside down: the thumb printed on the top note of a right-hand chord and the little finger on the bottom, in the score and in the finger-position editor. A chord is now fingered by its pitches, whichever order they were written in.