Ooloi: An Organism Evolved

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22/3/2026

The above GIF demonstrates some of the functionality of the Instrument Library and Piece Window at this point: selection of score language, filtering on names, drag-copying, deleting, etc. What you see above is not the full 1000+ instrument selection, but a smaller library I use for development and testing. The notifications to the lower right are likewise for development.

8 Comments

Magnus Johansson

22/3/2026 17:50:57

Will there be a corresponding "Button Show" meaning that the commands you show in this GIF also will be possible to give from the computer keyboard using so-called keyboard navigation?

Peter Bengtson

22/3/2026 19:55:36

Keyboard navigation is very much on the radar – some of it is already in place, in fact. Exact bindings are still settling as the interface matures. More will become clear as the everyday workflow solidifies.

Magnus Johansson

24/3/2026 11:07:29

How will Ooloi work linguistically? Can one have the user interface in say Danish but the score in Finnish?

Peter Bengtson

24/3/2026 13:21:07

Yes – the user interface language and the score language are completely independent. You can have the interface in Danish and the score in Finnish without any conflict.

Ooloi supports any number of interface languages such as UK and US English, Danish, Portuguese (two versions), German, French, Polish, Ukrainian, and so forth. And these translations can be added to or modified by end-users using standard tools every translator is familiar with.

Score languages are something different. Here, Ooloi supports five languages: German, French, Italian, English, and – Other. You can use Other for anything you like, like Finnish. But the vast majority of scores out there are in those four languages, and the 270 or so instruments are translated to those languages so you don't have to do any translation manually for the 99.99% of scores we deal with as musicians on a daily basis. And for everything else you can just copy things to Other and use whatever language(s) you need.

Magnus Johansson

24/3/2026 13:42:25

OK, so can one set Other to "Same as user interface" and have both score with instrument names and user interface in that same language?

Peter Bengtson

24/3/2026 13:50:40

There's no automatic coupling between the two – they're always independent choices. But nothing stops you from having both in the same language. If you want everything in Finnish, you'd set the interface to Finnish (provided a Finnish translation file exists) and separately add Finnish instrument entries to your library. The two just happen to match; neither one drives the other.

In practice, I expect this to be the common case. A German engraver will probably use German as their interface language – Ooloi detects your locale automatically – and probably always use German as their score language. The Instrument Library then only shows instruments with German titles, reducing the cognitive load. The independence matters for the cases where it matters – an Italian opera house producing a score with Italian instrument names on a Swedish computer, say – but most of the time the two will simply agree.

Magnus Johansson

24/3/2026 14:01:38

Thanks for the explanation!

Peter Bengtson

24/3/2026 15:08:33

You're very welcome!

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