What is best way to organize?

[John Sellers]

I did not get the teacher version, and perhaps for this reason I find the customize facility a bit awkward.

I do not in principle need the teacher version for there is nobody but myself who will ever use my copy of the application.

However, only the teacher version gives you complete control over the lessons, and that presents a few problems for my special needs.

For example, I wish to require higher quality results, so I never advance unless I do a lesson 100% 3 times in a row...which is enough to prove I have a complete understanding of the lesson content...

So this leads to a few situations where I would like to ORGANIZE a series of remedial exercises for those areas where my efforts do not tend to converge to 100%. Must I upgrade to the teacher's version to do this?


Example of how I thought to solve remediation needs: Consider confusion between perfect 4th and perfect 5th in Interval training. I have tried lesson 12 a dozen times, and still find I confuse 4ths and 5ths about 25% of the time and occasionally also confuse 6ths with 4ths and 5ths. So I thought I would set up the following exercises:

test item type A: partial scale in which first and last notes are a 5th apart.
test item type B: partial scale in which first and last notes are a 4th apart.
test item type C: partial scale in which first and last notes are a 6th apart.

Series of New Lessons:
type A & type B only
type A & type C only
type B & type C only
type A, B, & C only
4ths & 5ths only
5ths & 6ths only
4ths & 6ths only
4ths, 5ths, & 6ths only

With decently long sessions I figured going through such a set would improve my discrimination among 4ths, 5ths, and 6ths. However unless I am missing something I don't see any good grouping mechanism without the teachers edition...especially considering that I will be doing this with MANY other problems as I discover my difficulties. For example discriminating between sus2 and sus4.

So is there any good way to organize these without resorting to the teachers version? Or is there an effective way to organize things by folders or something so I CAN EASILY AND EFFECTIVELY move around among my many groups of new lessons?

Thanks,

[Hans]

With EarMaster Pro you can use the "Customized exercise" to make your own lessons. You can save a custom lesson so you can make your own list of lessons.
What you would do is to
1) Choose the Customized exercise.
2) In the configuration window that pops up, select only 4th and 5th
3) Also make the other settings you would like, e.g. if they should be played melodic or harmonic.
4) Click Ok to close the window and go to the exercise.
5) In the "File" menu of the main EarMaster window, choose "Save Exercise setup as..."
6) Give the lesson a descriptive name e.g. "4th and 5th" and save it in the location you want.

Now you can anytime click the yellow "Open folder" button in the toolbar and choose the setup you just made. Just repeat the steps above to make all the lessons you want.

Best regards,
Hans Jakobsen
EarMaster

[John Sellers]

Thanks for the the feedback

OK...so what I infer from your comments and my understanding of the product. I can NOT add items to the Exercise area, or additional items to the "Choose lesson" dialog unless I have teacher's edition of the program. Is this correct?

If I understand the situation correctly, the only way I can add my customized lessons is to the Training mode>>yellow folder.

I can, however, change the directory in the "Save exercise setup as.." dialog if I wish, but it turns out that if it is in a subdirectory of the directory of the yellow folder, it does NOT show up in the Training mode>>yellow folder link list as a folder or lesson.

I can however use the the Training mode>>yellow folder>>browse to find the folder and put it in the Training mode>>File: link.

This will work, but it is pretty awkward...

I believe that in best of all worlds I would be able to add to the "Exercise Area" list or the "Choose lesson" list even though I am not a teacher and do not have a "class" of students, but wish to only set these up for my own personal use...

Doesn't that sound reasonable? Which suggests that a similar capability would be appropriate for the the personal version of the product.

Cheers, John Sellers

[John Sellers]

In the early days of PCs when hard disks were added. Almost everyone put their files in a single directory not realizing the significance of a folder hierarchy.

This is exactly the problem I am confronted with if I am going to solve a large number of problems because of my special needs. There may be a number of problems I encounter in the process of learning 650 lessons in which I need special remediation. If I have special problems with 10% of the lessons, then I will want 65 sets of special lessons. Each of these sets, if similar in size to the set I want to help me with 4ths, 5ths and 6ths, then I might have as many as 8 or 10 customized lessons to add to help me with each special needs problem. Which is to say I might add almost as many customized lessons as there are regular lessons....

Clearly organizing customized lessons in a hierarchical way is the only way to go.


Do you see my problem with the current, single directory linear list solution? Sure! I can work around it, but in any case, without hierarchical support, its going to be pretty awkward. I would much rather see you make minor changes to the application that would enable me, and other users to easily organize their custom lessons...Actually, unless this is done, I am going to have to get the teacher's edition....and I don't think it is quite right to have to do this seeing I am the only user.

[Hans]

You make a simple task sound very complicated. It takes only a few seconds to define your own lesson. You can save it in a file or not, but even if you save 60 custom lessons, then it is quite simple to give them names so they are sorted in groups that makes them easy to find. You have always easy access to your custom lessons from the training wizard or from the yellow folder button in the toolbar.

The options available to define the content of the lesson is exactly the same wether you use the Customized exercise in EarMaster Pro or the Tutor editor in EarMaster School. Let me quote from the EarMaster help about the tutor editor in EarMaster School:
"With the tutor editor you can make series of lessons and save them in one tutor file. Other users can easily open your tutor and begin working with the lessons you have made.
A lesson is actually a custom exercise setup where you have added a few extra properties like a title, description and some limits that control what result (% score) is needed to move on to the next lesson."

Best regards,
Hans Jakobsen
EarMaster

[Guest]

I already understood what you said, and yes everything you say is true.

But none of it applies to the issue I've been trying to get you to understand...which is hierarchy...Handling 60 files as you suggest doesn't have much to do with handling 600 custom exercises as I expect to be confronted with in the long term.

What you said about 60 lessons is true, but it is NOT true of 600 lessons...10% or more your 650 lessons will probably be problematic for my special needs (being slightly like an autistic person) so I will probably be generating 65 GROUPS of lessons, not just 60 custom lessons. Each group will solve one problem for me, and if they turn out like my first one, might add about 8 to 10 custom lessons each..which comes to be more than 500 lessons, maybe more than 600 lessons.

Now naming files could work, but would be pretty awkward if there were 650 in the list....

Remember a change in quantity is also a change in quality. For example: You can put a saddle on a horse and the works great, but if you are going to hitch 4 horses to a wagon you have to use something different than a saddle....you are in a sense pointing out the EarMaster equivalent of a saddle, but I need a good hierarchy such as the "Exercise Area>>Choose lesson" hierarchy to make the most of my time over the next 3 or 4 years.

From the point of view of a semi-retired system designer in Silicon Valley, your "yellow folder" is a mistake in design because you have introduced two ways of organizing the lessons which serve the same purpose but are dfferent in nature, and that introduces complexity of design which will always have unintended negative consequences (such as my situation).

You would be better off if instead of using the "yellow folder" logic, you used the "Exercise Area>>Choose lesson" functionality to organize custom lessons...then custom lessons would have the same accessibility as regular lessons rather than something completely different...You will find that people will learn one way of using a program and often never go beyond that...structuring your "yellow folder" different from the rest of the lessons increases what you users must learn in order to make custom lessons.

My situation seems to be simple and artificial problem to you...but you see I look forward to how I will be using this lesson down the road and I see problems and lost of time in the future if I have to use the "yellow folder" to organize things.

You see, I wish to learn Jazz well, and I am am just starting out although I do a lot of classical and old time fiddle music...I've never done much ear training and will need it for what I want to do in Jazz...I think it will take me three or four years to get there...and being able to easily organize my ear training stuff well will be important to the level of mastery I can achieve. Some complicated hard work up front will pay off in simplicity later on. I want a well ordered system I can count on. If you improve your product in the future and eliminate the "yellow folder", then my using the "yellow folder" will cause me some headache down the road. I am willing to bet that if your product doesn't stagnate and continues to get better, as some point you will get rid of the "yellow folder" concept.

Sorry if it what I said sounds complicated, but the dilemma is that communicating new ideas is always hard, especially when talking to companies, because of the requirements of business it is hard for them to go beyond what is established, which is what I have made a living doing. I have designed and built new kinds of CAD systems as well has factory floor configuration software...among other things.

So the bottom line, even though I don't think I should have to, I am going to go ahead and buy the teacher's edition...

Thanks for your attention, John Sellers