Musical notation in LC

[Timothy]

I posted this in another sub-forum, then realized no one ever posts there. So I'm repeating here:

Is there a library or set of extensions that makes it possible to display musical notation in LC? Also, possibly, to play the notes displayed?

Thanks!

[bn]

Hi Timothy,

for MacOSX there is an external with a free trial version.

http://sunny-tdz.com/sunnymidi

as far as display of musical notation there is nothing I have heard of. You would have to roll your own.

Kind regards
Bernd

[Timothy]

Well, thanks, Bernd. That would have been helpful. I wouldn't mind paying the $79, but $500 per year for the commercial version of LiveCode would definitely bust the budget. I'm working on a stack for personal use, to help me improve my sight-singing skills.

I have already begun to roll my own. What I have so far is usable, but pretty primitive, and has been tedious to script. Higher levels of complexity and functionality would take some doing.

If others have made stacks that display and play musical notation, using native tools, do you want to share? Or maybe you could explain how you did it?

[[-hh]]

To the 'typeset'-part of your question:

There is a free software that is even used by professional typesetters for sheets. The best typesetting engine on earth, since thirty years: TeX, originally by Donald Knuth.
You can control with that everything in the output, down to units that are difficult to read for the human eye.

Includes 'music'-packages for scripting, also fonts. Can directly typeset to PDF. It's certainly more difficult than simply using a special font, but scripting isn't more difficult than LivecodeScript.

If it's new for you, start with LaTeX (a special set of macros, has a very large community). If you use it, don't hesitate to download always the 'huge' package. This is updated once a year and contains everything you need (2-3 GByte).

There are many national user groups (use also wikipedia for links on their "TeX" pages). And there are a lot of free tutorials and introductions.
Special page for Mac: https://tug.org/mactex/

You could always start from here: https://tug.org
Special packages for sheet typesetting on that: http://ctan.org/pkg/:M

If you use it and there arise questions you can ask me, I never used anything else for typesetting (a few times I used it also to typeset musical sheets for a colleague).

[I must second Bernd for the other part of your question: Thierry's MIDI-external is excellent, worth every single cent].

[bn]

Hi Timothy,

when I played around with sunnyMidi a longer while ago I started to do a stack, that lets you drag notes off a template and place them on a staff. They will snap to the lines/in between lines.

Those notes are graphics with their marker set. the actual graphic is only 1 point. That way it is easier to control the placement of the graphic. Most of the stuff is in a button used as behavior. Some code in CardScript.

As I sayed, it was just a start and the fun part was to play the notes. But if you want to use this stack to sketch a musical sheet go ahead. The code is not very clean and elaborate, but here it goes.

Kind regards

Bernd

[Timothy]

Thanks to -hh and Bernd. I'll try your stack, Bernd. It might help move this project along.

If others are following this thread, looking for ideas, I use MuseScore, an open-source free application, to make the needed notation, import screen shots from MuseScore into LiveCode, to display notation. I can also use MuseScore to produce needed musical notes, export them as .mp3, play them in LiveCode. You can do a lot that way, but it's slow and cumbersome. Doubtlessly Thierry's MIDI external would make it easier, but that requires the commercial version of LC, which I don't own. This is a low-budget hobby stack.

Cheers, Tim