Minuet 26.08: call for testers

Minuet is a KDE's application for music education. It helps students and musicians train their ears with exercises for intervals, chords, scales, and rhythms. Minuet 26.08 is shaping up to be a particularly exciting release, with new ways to practice, a redesigned interface, and support for more platforms. We would love your help testing these changes before the final release. Try the exercises described below, explore the application on your devices, and tell us about any problems you find.<br>CI builds are beta snapshots rather than finished releases, so please do not rely on them for important work. Installation instructions are at the end of this post.<br>A redesigned, responsive interface<br>Minuet has a new interface built to work well on both desktop and mobile screens. The home page and navigation drawer make exercise categories easier to find, while the exercise browser presents each activity as a card with a short description. Your current category remains highlighted, and the new search field filters exercises by their translated names and descriptions. Exercise pages have also been reorganized to use the available space better on narrow windows and phones.<br>Things to test:<br>Browse every category from the drawer and return to the home page.<br>Search using full and partial exercise names, descriptions, different letter cases, and your system language.<br>Check the empty-search-results message and clear the search afterward.<br>Resize the window from very wide to very narrow and look for clipped controls, overlapping text, unnecessary scrollbars, or lost navigation state.<br>Try keyboard, mouse, and touch input where available, as well as both light and dark color schemes.<br>Answer questions correctly and incorrectly and check the answer animation, keyboard, staff, and controls.<br>The new exercise browser with several descriptive cards visible and a search term entered in the drawer<br>Guides for first-time users<br>The first melodic, rhythmic, singing, or clapping exercise you open now offers a short interactive guide (based on new Kirigami-addons onboard module). Each guide points out the controls and feedback relevant to that type of practice. You can decline the guide, finish or cancel it, and open it again later with the Help button.<br>Things to test:<br>Accept and complete each of the four guides: melodic, rhythmic, singing, and clapping.<br>Choose Not Now , leave the exercise, and confirm that Minuet does not repeatedly interrupt you.<br>Cancel a running guide and check that the exercise returns to its normal state.<br>Start a guide again from the Help button after completing or declining it.<br>Check that callouts point to the correct controls at different window sizes.<br>An exercise page with an onboarding callout highlighting the answer controls<br>More control over practice and sound<br>The new settings page gathers Minuet's everyday controls into Practice , Sound , and Microphone groups. You can change exercise speed, rhythm tempo, the number of rhythm patterns, test length, playback volume, melodic instrument, and percussion sound. Singing and clapping settings include the microphone input, voice class, pitch tolerance, timing tolerance, and calibration guidance. A collapsed Advanced section exposes detection algorithms and thresholds for difficult microphones or noisy rooms, with an option to restore the defaults.<br>Settings are persistent, so your choices should still be present the next time Minuet starts.<br>Things to test:<br>Change each basic setting and confirm that the next exercise uses the new value.<br>Select instruments from different General MIDI groups and try several percussion sounds.<br>Restart Minuet and confirm that your choices were saved.<br>Test microphone selection with no input device, one device, and multiple devices if possible.<br>Expand and collapse the Advanced section, adjust its controls, and use Reset to Defaults .<br>Check helper text, control labels, ranges, keyboard navigation, and layouts on narrow screens.<br>The settings page showing the basic controls sections<br>New melodic-interval exercises<br>Minuet previously separated ascending and descending melodic intervals. The new Melodic intervals collection mixes both directions, requiring you to identify the interval itself rather than anticipate its direction. It includes focused groups such as seconds or sixths, combinations such as fourths and fifths, and broader challenges covering compound intervals all the way through the fifteenth.<br>Things to test:<br>Confirm that questions include both ascending and descending intervals.<br>Work through focused, mixed, and compound-interval groups, including Second to 15th .<br>Replay questions and compare what you hear with the piano keyboard and staff.<br>Check enharmonic spellings, accidentals, ledger lines, answer choices, and scoring.<br>Start and stop a test run and verify that its length matches the configured number of exercises.<br>A compound melodic-interval question with its notes visible on both the staff and piano...