Feature request Chart for Archived MIDI - see how much you've played

interesting idea.  on linux it wouldn't be so bad to hack something together out of python/perl and gnuplot to do this, but maybe that's not the answer you're after ...

i might try it at some point to see what happens.

Could you showcase it? I'm on MacOS here
But if enough people like it, it might just be done by Modarrt for the next minor update.

Fun idea, but i'm not entirely sure there would be a huge fan base for it in this community - and therefor it might not end up very high on the Modartt priority to-do list...

That would be my worry too - to me (personally) it would be akin to tracking everything trackable on your road bike for a day or two (just because it's possible), publish it proudly to all friends on facebook and then loose interest for lack of further purpose (other then fun).

In the mean time: have you seen that if you instruct PT to record everything you play, you'll end up with a list of midi files the names of which contain the date and day, the number of notes played, and the time it took you to play them. You could collect that data in a spread sheet and calculate all sorts of things - a little more effort and typing, but the same result. The function is a little hidden:

File >  Recently played on the keyboard > MIDI archive settings
(or click the demo name in the section of the User Interface, and choose the bottom option)

i'd be happy to share the image, i just don't see how to do it in the forum ...

maybe someone could explain how to upload an image?

thanks, i see how to do it now (what i was missing was that the image had to be hosted somewhere online ... there doesn't seem to be a way to upload local files).

this is what i got from analyzing 2020 (and adding up the total notes and time played per day)

Information regarding exercise efforts can be extremely important for building and maintaining a habit.  The website Strava.com has built a valuable business off of this, giving runners and cyclists a place to upload data (collected on gps watches or cycling computers) regarding every run or ride they do.  Having this record is really helpful for all sorts of reasons: there's no uncertainty regarding what you've done in the past, you can motivate yourself ("I'm going to try to do more than last week), there's an incentive to keep streaks going ("I've run every day for the last two weeks and I want to keep that streak going"), and more.  Way more.

Yes, something like Strava makes it public and has a social media aspect.  But that's not necessary at all, and many people use it despite not liking the social aspects Strava.  (There are of course ways to do this entirely in private, using other apps, but many people find that Strava's public nature helps them keep getting out there for regular running and cycling; not a bad thing in my opinion.)

Anyway, I've tried several times to clock and record all my piano practice time.   I'd like to know it.  I think knowing that would be helpful.  But every time I've tried I've failed.  Never was able to develop the habit of logging all my time.

I'd never thought about it before, but that archived group of midi files in Pianoteq is actually a good source of info to create a record that gives a pretty good indication of how much you've practiced.  It doesn't exactly indicate the time spent sitting at a piano keyboard.  But it would not be far off for me. And it's quite easy to process that list of files in a Python script (or some other scripting language) to convert the list of filenames into a useful form, both textual and graphic.  Whether it's in Python or some other language, there are ways to make it easy to execute that script on a Mac, Windows, or Linux PC.

So I'll look forward to checking out any script that's made public for this.  Or I'll end up writing my own and offering it up here.

here's the script i used (perl).  it was quick and dirty, so please no code bashing   (well, if you have some advice that's great.) i'm on a linux box.  there are two perl modules i used for convenience, Time::Piece and File::Finder.

my midi files are sitting under this in directories ./2021, ./2020, etc., with subdirectories for each month, just as PTQ stores them in the midi archive.  in particular the months are 0-padded 2-digit strings.

the script writes to stdout and produces three columns.  the first is day-of-year, the second the notes played on that day, and the third is the time in seconds on that day.  i loaded the output into gnuplot to produce the graph.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use Time::Piece;
use File::Finder;
use autodie;
use v5.10;

die "usage: $0 year\n" if @ARGV < 1;

my ($year) = @ARGV;

my @midifiles = grep {/\.mid/} File::Finder->in("./$year/");

my %playingdata = ();
for my $f (@midifiles) {
  my $date = "";
  my $notes = "";
  my $seconds = "";
  if ($f =~ m|\./$year/\d\d/([\d-]+) \d+ [()\w]+ (\d+) notes, (\d+) seconds|) {
    ($date, $notes, $seconds) = ($1, $2, $3);
  }
  my $dayofyear = Time::Piece->strptime($date, "%Y-%m-%d")->yday();
  $playingdata{$dayofyear}{"notes"} += $notes;
  $playingdata{$dayofyear}{"seconds"} += $seconds;
}

for (sort {$a <=> $b} keys %playingdata) {
  say "$_ $playingdata{$_}{'notes'} $playingdata{$_}{'seconds'}";
}

I don't know what MEGA is.  But the problem with having something on a webserver to do this is that accessing a server from your webbrowser won't be able to access the local filesystem and get the names of the all the files, which are what contain the data needed for the analysis.  Users could have some local app that processes the filenames and gives a lump of text to upload to a server, but it's barely any harder to build a local app that does all the analysis without having a server involved.  So I think the server might actually end up complicating things for users, not simplifying.

You could basically put this as HTML code, and at the point you want to use values, add them. The CSS is completely optional.
So you are generating a HTML file, that you can then Host on Port 80.

I'm going to try today again.

You can access the local files. You are just going to overwrite the html file lets say each hour. The files either are already on the server because pianoteq runs on it or because they are synced from client to server regularly.

The sync is actually the easiest.

You would just copy the html code and append your data. Top to bottom. Or bottom to top.
Http-server from npm is good suited for that task of hosting either locally or on the web. On the web you would simply add nginx for https

**Edit** Working on it, think I can do it this weekend or so.

I wonder if all this syncing and server stuff is necessary, or making things easier.

E.g., it's pretty easy to create a file containing a list with all the midi playing data:

To do this on a Windows PC, in a terminal window, just enter the command:

>  dir c:\users\[your user name]\AppData\Roaming\Modartt\Pianoteq\Archive\*.mid /s > mylist.txt

This will create a file with a list of all the midi filenames (i.e., all the data), and it will have the name 'mylist.txt'.

That file can then be processed to create a graph, either by uploading to a server app, or processing with some fairly simple app on your pc. 

The 'dir' command itself can be put into a simple batch file so a user can run it simply by clicking an icon on their desktop.