Key-independent search

[MichiHo]

Hi! So I'm not sure whether this belongs here, but do you plan on enabling key-independent search as well? I'm a developer & folk musician myself and often thought about how cool that would be, and also whether I should try to implement it somehow. I very often don't know the correct key of a tune at the moment when I want to look it up. Now I think I could try integrating it into folkfriend (when I have the time, that would be sometime after July, and also depending on how hard it turns out to be), but maybe you've already made attempts yourself?
If this really is no GitHub Issue material at all we can also move it over to e-mail or something.

Best regards
Michael

[TomWyllie]

Hi Michael,

Thanks for bringing this up and I'm glad you're interested in Folkfriend! The issue of key-independent search that you mention is something I've thought about before, and deliberately didn't implement as part of earlier versions because usually people play/transcribe tunes in the same keys, and so hearing the absolute key actually conveys useful information to improve average performance.

However - it's a great idea because there are definitely cases where this would be useful. The most obvious example is if a tune is in the folkfriend database in one key but being played in another. So I think it'd be useful to have some sort of option to do a "deep search" where it compares every key, or perhaps even do this automatically if no good matches are found.

I have deliberately open sourced this project so that other people can help improve folkfriend and would be very happy if you wanted to have a look at implementing this key independent search feature! I'll try and push out some updates in the next couple of weeks that make it easier to get started on developing folkfriend, improving documentation on how the different parts of the app fit together.