Hi, I am hoping there can be a provision for not loading the youtube video as default when in the Hooktab section. I am trying to encourage my students ( NSW government school - Australia ) to use Hooktheory. Our students are barred from access to Youtube by the department of education, as a result they can’t use the hooktab section because there is no way to select ‘piano’ once a song is loading.
Can anything be done as a work around? It is difficult to engage them when one of the main functions of the site freezes for them. Few are willing to explore on their own at home, where the restrictions don’t apply, if they can’t get a feel for the site at school.
I realize there is no real benefit to port features you develop for the latest versions of browsers as a ‘legacy’ version for older versions of IE, but without access to the latest IE at school some of the computers we have (IE 9) can’t even view the site. Again, the students are a little hesitant to just take my word for the benefits to their musical development if they can’t explore the site and have me demonstrate it to them.
Thanks for considering the Youtube as default issue.
@MACINTYREH, thanks for bringing this up. I imagine it might be an issue for other schools and is something we honestly have not thought of. Let me think for a day or so on options for a solution. I’ll get back to you and see which things we come up with would work best for you.
@MACINTYREH, I came up with a solution that I hope works well for you. We added a settings page to TheoryTab. It allows you to customize several display options, including the ability to disable YouTube videos. A link to the TheroyTab settings page is on the right of the TheoryTab header. You will need to instruct each student to click the “Disable YouTube setting” option from their computer. They will only need to do this once; the settings will persist across browsing sessions. We are also working on a solution to properly catch YouTube timeouts and switch to instrumental but that will take a little longer. I hope this helps. Cheers.
Thank you for being so accommodating. As a solution to our dilema I believe the students will have no issue using the settings page. I hope it isn’t inconvinient for other users that don’t have our issue.
It is the beginning of our weekend here so it will be a couple of days before we can see what impact it has for the students. I am quite sure they will, at the very least, bemore eager to explore the site and cary the interest home with them. (particularly as they were shown the post and they decided to take some ownership for the request).
I am confident they will begin to recognise the benefits of analysing their favourite music and eventually composing or developing performance charts using the same universal numeral system as in TheoryTabs.
Will post again after the classes have been shown the new settings page.
We have had a chance to try the modification to the site in the settings section with some success. Those students fortunate enough to be in the school computer labs with Win 7 machines and IE 10 enjoyed the complete experience without trouble, thanks to the settings allowing their choice of songs to load and play without the youtube video.
Thankyou, again, for modifying your site to help us with this.
We will let you know how things go when the students start to use the compositional side of the site.
The rest of the students, actually in our computer lab, were restricted in their use mainly due to the computer they are using. We have a number of legacy machines that are taken out of the frontlines of school use and see out their days in various classrooms. Our music department is slowly changing all the machines from our current crop of XP machines running IE 8 (I think that is the most advanced they can cope with) through some VISTA ultimate machines running IE 9 (again the most advanced they can cope with, I think) to finally arrive at Win 7 (32bit) which is the most advanced OS we can use to still be able to run the programs we use to support our music course in the classroom. We currently have 1 computer with win 7 and IE 10. More will eventually replace the older ones mentioned, but it will be a long time for all 9 to be changed.
I will start another thread asking for assistance in tracking down the optimum combinations of older OS and the best browser to have installed in order to access the HookTheory site.
Hopefully this will continue to expand our capacity to teach, assisted by your innovations.
