Blind Bargains

#CSUN14 Audio: Dancing Dots Sees the Light with New Lime Lighter Models


The Lime Lighter from Dancing Dots has become more versatile with some new configurations to meet a variety of music needs including a model which sits on an existing keyboard stand to provide magnified sheet music. Bill McCann, Founder and President of Dancing Dots, joins us to talk about these devices and how they are making music more accessible to students and professionals. Blind Bargains audio coverage of CSUN 2014 is generously sponsored by the American Foundation for the Blind.

Transcript

We strive to provide an accurate transcription, though errors may occur.

Hide transcript
Direct from San Diego, it’s BlindBargains.com coverage of CSUN 2014. The biggest names, provocative interviews, and wall-to-wall exhibit hall coverage, brought to you by the American Foundation for the Blind.

Are you willing to share your skills and knowledge of the workplace as a person who is blind or visually impaired? Become an AFB Career Connect Mentor and help jobseekers find their path to success. Sign up today at www.careerconnect.org.

Now, here’s J.J. Meddaugh.

J.J.: We are here once again with Bill McCann, the President/Founder of Dancing Dots, and here to look at the latest in the Lime Lighter and some other cool music tools. As always, Bill, welcome back to Blind Bargains.

BM: Hey, thanks, J.J. Great to be back with you here at another CSUN.

J.J.: Yes, definitely. Some new – announced a couple months ago of some products under your Lime Lighter series. Let’s talk about that.

BM: Yeah, the Lime Lighter, as some of your listeners probably know, is our first product for low-vision musicians. It magnifies standard print music up to 10 times; it makes it really big. We package it with different hardware. The Presto model, which was our original model, it’s a big 23-inch screen that we mount on a special custom-made music stand, and that works great for a lot of people.

But we came across a really cool tablet from Dell. I’m going to pick it up now – you probably have a microphone in your hand, but I’m going to – I don’t know if you can reach out and…

J.J.: Right here. All right.

BM: Touch this thingy.

J.J.: Okay. Oh, there, yes.

BM: Yeah. It’s only 5 pounds. And see those little legs? They fold in. This thing’s only about an inch thick. So I have it resting here on a piano.

J.J.: It’s a keyboard stand.

BM: Yeah, basically, where you would put the music book.

J.J.: Yeah, there’s a keyboard right here.

BM: Yeah. Wait a minute, we’d better turn it on, just so people will know that we’re not making this stuff up.

J.J.: Right? (keyboard music plays) There you go. So someone who has low vision can use this on a keyboard or whatever to read music?

BM: Yeah. You’re going to use a pedal, with your left foot probably, you press on the right side of the pedal, and the measure we’re looking at now slides off to the left and the next measure replaces it. So you’re kind of always looking in the same direction. The music tracks to your eye; you don’t have to track your eye to the music.

J.J.: Oh wow.

BM: You never have to turn a page. Yeah, it also has a markup feature, so you can touch the tablet, you can touch it and draw on the screen, if the conductor says to cross something out or…

J.J.: So is this one designed to go just on keyboard stands, or is there a stand that you could get for it as well?

BM: This one, our intention is that you can put it on whatever stand you want. The little legs in the back fold out; you can put it on a tabletop. It’s 5 pounds, it runs on battery for up to 4 hours. So if your band or choral group or orchestra has a run-out concert somewhere, you don’t have to be – or even if you’re at your home base, you don’t have to be tethered to AC power.

J.J.: Sure.

BM: And as I said, since it’s only 5 pounds, your average 5th grader could easily pick this up and move it from classroom to classroom, from practice room to stage.

J.J.: Yeah, it looks pretty durable, too. Does it come with some sort of case, I’m assuming, for traveling?

BM: We need to get that together. This is the first – well, this is technically the second show I’m showing it. I’ve only sold one so far, so this is kind of new. But I think a little SoftPack case might be nice to package with this thing.

J.J.: Okay. There’s a couple new models, right? There’s another one out as well?

BM: Yeah, we sell another thing we call the Sonata, and that is not an all-in-one computer like this; it comes with a lightweight monitor. You supply your own laptop or desktop, whatever have you. It’s a little less convenient, but it’s a little cheaper because they already have a laptop.

Then we sell what we call Lime Lighter Liberty, which is just the software and the pedal. And that’s – you can put it on anything. I had a guy who said, “I don’t need any more hardware in this house. I’ve got a 42-inch screen on top of my home organ in my living room.” I said, “Okay, you don’t need any more hardware.”

J.J.: Yeah, I guess you’re good there.

BM: Yeah.

J.J.: The software’s all Windows-based, I take it?

BM: Yes, it’s Windows-based, and it’s standalone. It comes with music OCR software, so you can get your music in there to magnify it. You can also import music XML format, so more and more XMLs popping up on the net, or you can export it from commercial packages like Finale, Sibelius, and so forth. Probably at this point there are literally hundreds of music notation programs that support music XML.

And then, because it is built on a music editor called Lime, you can not only read your music, you can write your music in an accessible environment. T his product, Lime Lighter, you can blow up the staff, and when you add your notes, you see them nice and big, play them in on a musical keyboard or click them in or whatever you want to do.

And this same product line is also a big component of our solution for people like me who read Braille and use speech. That’s called GoodFeel.

J.J.: Right. The Braille music translation software that’s been around for awhile, absolutely. What’s the pricing for the new models?

BM: Okay, the price range goes from $1995 for Lime Lighter Liberty – that’s just software and pedal – I think the Sonata is $2895; that’s the one you need your own laptop. This one we’re calling Leggiero, which is kind of a joke because leggiero in Italian means “light,” so it’s “Lime Lighter Light.” This little guy I just showed you, this tablet, that’s $3495. And then the Presto, the big guy on the custom stand, that’s $3995.

J.J.: Okay. Aside from that, you said there was an update going on for CakeTalking, long-running scripts for Sonar.

BM: Yes, this year David Pinto, CakeTalking scripter, draw scripter extraordinaire, has put up the new release of CakeTalking. It’s Version 8.8. It runs with Sonar 8.5. There are a lot of nice bug fixes, a lot of nice additions to what plug-ins we support.

But I think the coolest feature is what he calls “Sweet Spot Clicker,” which was a deliberate homage to our customer Jim Snowbarger, who made the Hotspot clicker.

J.J.: Hotspot clicker, yep.

BM: It’s not nearly as robust as what Jim did, but for what we need in CakeTalking, it’s very cool. Because let’s say one customer of ours wanted to use this pipe organ plug-in, emulates the sound of different pipe organs around the world. We found it was basically inaccessible, but if you have a sighted assistance once help you to map out some X-Y positions, you can save them.

For example, you can say, I don’t know, “French Baroque organ” or whatever; you put the mouse where you need to be, you call up a little dialogue in CakeTalking, you call it “French Baroque organ. Then the next time you want that in your project, you don’t need a sighted assistant. You just go back to the list, go down the list, find “French Baroque organ,” hit enter, and bam, you’re there.

J.J.: Can those sweet spot definitions be shared amongst users?

BM: Yes, they can be shared.

J.J.: Are you planning on having any sort of repository or place where people can see what’s available?

BM: We really need to get that together. I think it’s a great idea; it’s just one of those great ideas we haven’t got around to. If our users – we should probably just put it out to people and say “Hey guys, if you have something and you want to put it up…” Yeah, we should definitely do that. I think people would really appreciate that.

J.J.: Sure. So it sounds like some challenges still remain. For those who may not be aware, Sonar 8.5 is a slightly older version of, and there must be more challenges to try to use the newer versions of Sonar as opposed to the current one.

BM: Yeah, a couple years ago, the people at Cakewalk, who make Sonar, decided to make what they call their X series. I’m told that the user interface looks very cool, but unfortunately, it broke most of the functionality that David Pinto had built into his CakeTalking scripts for JAWS.

J.J.: Right, so it’d be a total rewrite just to get that going.

BM: Pretty much, a virtual rewrite. So he’s been hanging back. He’s also been preoccupied with his talking typing tutor – I probably butchered the name of that, but he has a very cool typing tutor program that talks with JAWS. And as you can imagine, that’s a much more mainstream program. As much as we love music and we think we’re the center of the universe, when it comes to it, the music side of this niche business is really a niche of a niche.

J.J.: Yeah, absolutely.

BM: That being said, David has not told me he never will do it, but I am not holding my breath. Meantime, 8.5 is a wonderful, robust package. If you want to make professional-sounding records with it, we have customers who do just that. And we have a lot of hobbyists, of course, and people just having a good time with it and recreational time with it. It’s a very full-featured package, and you can get your work done for sure.

J.J.: Sure. You mentioned a couple new books that you’ve come out with?

BM: Yeah, we have new publications by our friend Richard Taesch. We published Richard’s series, Introduction to Music for the Blind Student, for many years, and it’s been very popular and successful.

Basically, I feel like Richard’s series has been one of the things that kind of got Braille music off the ropes in this country and got it back to where people start asking – there was a time maybe 20 years ago when people didn’t know Braille music existed, and now we’re getting calls, “Okay, our 5th grade son is playing trumpet and we want to know how he can learn Braille music.”

But anyway, this third in the series, it’s called Introduction to Music for the Blind Student, but it’s called Teacher Training. It’s a book designed to teach teachers how to teach Braille music in different contexts, depending on the needs of the student. I’m going to hand it to you, and you’ll see it’s quite a tome. It’s got 600 pages.

J.J.: Oh yeah. That’s a print book. That’s heavy.

BM: Yeah. So I have elected not to make a hardcopy Braille edition, but we want to make an eBook version. We just officially released this a few weeks ago in print. And I think we probably will have – most of the customers will be excited people who are saying “How do I do this? How do I teach this blind” – I had a kid in here last night, wonderful, smart girl, 18 years old, going to college. She said to me, “Well, when I was in high school, I played the violin and I played in the orchestra, and I wanted to learn Braille music but they told me it was too hard for me to learn.” I just went off.

And I taught her Braille music in 5 minutes. I taught her eighths, quarters, halves, and wholes and the C scale. She learned it in 5 minutes. And I just said “The problem is it’s not that it’s too hard for you to learn; it’s too hard for people to teach because they haven’t been prepared. They just don’t know how to do it.”

So the conscientious, honest people will at least say “You know, I don’t know how to do that, and I don’t have time to learn.” But unfortunately, most people are like “That’s too hard. There’s no way you can learn that.” Imagine if your math teacher walked into class and said, “Well, I’m supposed to teach you trigonometry, but you know what? You guys, it’s too hard. You’re never going to learn.”

J.J.: Although sadly, that happens for some blind people too. You’re right.

BM: So you’re doomed to fail right from the start. But anyway, it was so much fun to show it to her, and it really brought up to me the need for this book that Richard put together. Because the people who really do take on the challenge, they need a resource, and this is it. So that’s one thing.

A friend of mine, David Simpson, has written a book we call Lime Aid. It’s essentially to teach you how to use Lime, our music notation program, with the scripts we call Lime Aloud so that you can basically read and write notation in Braille and print. It’s really optimized, let’s say, for the student who wants to go on to the college level. There’s a lot of reference to music theory and how to label chords with Roman numerals and all that good stuff that you do in music theory. So that’s been a new thing for us we’re just starting to sell.

Yeah, so those are the things happening.

J.J.: How did the whole – last year I believe that you were showing the conversion of one of those books towards using the tablets, the tactile tablets.

BM: Yeah. You know, I’m embarrassed to say we haven’t finished that project, not because we don’t want to, but we’ve had to turn our attention to so many other things in this last year. I have not abandoned that project, but it may not – well, let’s see what we’re talking about next year, J.J.

J.J.: Right, for sure. If people want to get more information about Dancing Dots and contact you, what’s the best way to do that?

BM: Yeah, dancingdots.com. We’re also on Twitter now. I think we’re called @dancingdotstech. And if I got that wrong, just please look up Dancing Dots; you’ll find us. Yeah, we have a YouTube channel now, we’ve got some videos up there in English and Spanish.

We have a very cool video that was made by customers in Argentina; they’re using our Lime Aloud technology, and we localized it to Spanish. You can hear JAWS cranked in Spanish. It’s very fun. And of course, they’re speaking Spanish in that beautiful Argentinean accent. They did a great job because they’re playing pieces they learned – and these are not simple pieces; they’re playing Mozart, Debussy, I think they have some Ravel in there – and they’re two sisters. They’re twins, and they play four hands. They’ll be sitting at the same keyboard. Fabiana and Paula.

They’re just charming, and they did a wonderful job not only presenting themselves, but how they learned the music. They go through it, and as I said, you can hear JAWS talking and going through each note. It’s kind of fun.

J.J.: Awesome. Hey, thank you so much, as always, Bill.

BM: All right, J.J. Pleasure.

J.J. plays keyboard jingle.

Blind Bargains is your home for the latest assistive technology news and reviews. Visit us at BlindBargains.com or follow Blind Bargains on Twitter for the inside scoop.

This has been another Blind Bargains audio podcast. Visit BlindBargains.com for the latest deals, news, and exclusive content. This podcast may not be retransmitted, sold, or reproduced without the express written permission of A T Guys. © 2014.


Listen to the File


File size: 15.2MB
Length: 16:35

Check out our audio index for more exclusive content
Blind Bargains Audio RSS Feed

This content is the property of Blind Bargains and may not be redistributed without permission. If you wish to link to this content, please do not link to the audio files directly.

Category: Computers/Hardware

No one has commented on this post.

You must be logged in to post comments.

Username or Email:
Password:
Keep me logged in on this computer

Or Forgot username or password?
Register for free

J.J. Meddaugh is an experienced technology writer and computer enthusiast. He is a graduate of Western Michigan University with a major in telecommunications management and a minor in business. When not writing for Blind Bargains, he enjoys travel, playing the keyboard, and meeting new people.


Copyright 2006-2024, A T Guys, LLC.