H
hazel
I have written something that I think might be useful to the wider community, but I've taken it as far as I can and now I need help.
Some of you may be familiar with Philip's Music Writer (pmw). It is based on a simple but brilliant idea: a language in which sheet music can be encoded in ASCII strings. You can (in principle) create a file of pmw code in any editor, then use the pmw program to convert it into music manuscript in postscript format. I use it quite a lot. The trouble is that while pmw files are easy to edit (and there is an excellent manual to help you add what you want) creating a syntactically correct pmw file that even approximates to the correct notes is less easy. The language is just not very intuitive, or at least I don't find it so.
What I have done is to create a graphical front end that provides a quick-and-dirty way to create that initial pmw file by pinning notes on a stave, just as you would do on paper. It uses only a tiny subset of the full pmw language, but you can edit and customise the file as much as you want later on. You can write more than one stave and do it over several sessions.
I have been in correspondence with the creator of pmw (his name, believe it or not, is Philip Hazel!), because I wanted his permission to do this; he might after all feel that adding a graphical input was not quite within the spirit of the thing. pmw is strictly cli. But he was very friendly and helpful.
Now I need someone who is a proper programmer to go over my work and make it bulletproof, then arrange to release it. After all, I'm only a dabbler in this sort of thing and probably have some very bad coding habits. It needs beta testing by someone who can read and write music, it needs a more professional looking interface with nice icons (mine are very crude), and if it can be made fit for release, it needs publicising.
Is there any knowledgeable person who has time for this?
Continue reading...
Some of you may be familiar with Philip's Music Writer (pmw). It is based on a simple but brilliant idea: a language in which sheet music can be encoded in ASCII strings. You can (in principle) create a file of pmw code in any editor, then use the pmw program to convert it into music manuscript in postscript format. I use it quite a lot. The trouble is that while pmw files are easy to edit (and there is an excellent manual to help you add what you want) creating a syntactically correct pmw file that even approximates to the correct notes is less easy. The language is just not very intuitive, or at least I don't find it so.
What I have done is to create a graphical front end that provides a quick-and-dirty way to create that initial pmw file by pinning notes on a stave, just as you would do on paper. It uses only a tiny subset of the full pmw language, but you can edit and customise the file as much as you want later on. You can write more than one stave and do it over several sessions.
I have been in correspondence with the creator of pmw (his name, believe it or not, is Philip Hazel!), because I wanted his permission to do this; he might after all feel that adding a graphical input was not quite within the spirit of the thing. pmw is strictly cli. But he was very friendly and helpful.
Now I need someone who is a proper programmer to go over my work and make it bulletproof, then arrange to release it. After all, I'm only a dabbler in this sort of thing and probably have some very bad coding habits. It needs beta testing by someone who can read and write music, it needs a more professional looking interface with nice icons (mine are very crude), and if it can be made fit for release, it needs publicising.
Is there any knowledgeable person who has time for this?
Continue reading...