musicraft 1.0.10

GUI for abcplus music notation.

MusicRaft

'MusicRaft' is a GUI for the ABC(plus) music notation, built around python and the Qt GUI toolkit. A note regarding this documentation: The documentation located on my gitlab page https://gitlab.com/papahippo/MusicRaft will tend to be more up-to-date than the documentation located on 'the python package index' https://pypi.org/project/MusicRaft/

The following screenshot will, I trust, paint the first thousand words of documentation:

Installation

This version of the musicraft package has been validated to work under Linux, under Windows and under MacOSX. Each of these, however, can be problematic in its own way. The various issues are dealt with in a separate document: install.

Musicraft works fine with python 3.13 on Linux and MacOS. On windows, with python 3.13, however, midi playing doesn't work. Until this bug is fixed, you can get full functionality by using python 3.12 or earlier.

A note regarding virtuaL environments: Since the introduction of the uv tool (this links to the official python package index, but tutorial introductions exist elsewhere) , working with virtual envronments has become fast and, at least under Linux, very easy. While I would encourage you to embrace the use of 'uv' also for musicraft, I have not yet updated these instructions accordingly.

Musicraft and its dependencies can be installed from the python package repository. The exact syntax will vary across platforms but will be something like...

pip3 install --user musicraft

... or ...

python3 -m pip install --user musicraft

The --user is not essential but it avoids permission problems, e.g. having to use sudo on Linux systems.

bundled 'command line' tools

The following 'command line' tools are automatically installed alongside musicraft into 'share' direcetories...

• abcm2ps to derive graphic scores from ABCplus code
• abcm2midi to derive midi files from ABCplus code
• abc2abc to transpose ABCplus code

... but don't worry, you won't actually have to use these from the command line! This is handled 'under the surface' by musicraft.

To keep the setup scripting simple, executables for Linux, Windows and Mac OSX are all installed, but of course, at run-time only the appropriate native versions are run.

bundled Documentation

I try to keep this README down to size, so that impatient users can get up and running quickly. Quite a lot of supplentary documentation gets installed alongside this README in the doc subdirectory, inculding an index.

Standalone binaries

Some time ago, I created (using PyInstaller) a standalone executable version of Musicraft for 64-bit systems under Windows (tested on Windows 10). N.B. I haven't recently regenerated this version so particularly the documentation may not match completely.

I have disabled the standalone binary for Linux. (don't ask; it was a long sad story which I have conveniently forgotten!)

I haven't looked into the desirability or feasibility of a standalone binary version for Mac OSX but am open to suggestions and guidance.

Running musicraft

Starting musicraft is a simple matter of ...

python -m musicraft [options] [abc-source-file-name ...]

... or ...

run_musicraft [options] [abc-source-file-name ...]

If no options are included, musicraft uses the bundled copies of the command-line tools ('abcm2ps' etc.). This behaviour can be specified explicitly by including optio -S or --share.

Conversely, in order to use versions of the these tools which were present on your system before musicraft was installed, include the option -X or --external.

It is possible to associate musicraft (and desired options) with all .abc files so that a double-click on such a file in the file manager is sufficient to start musicraft. How to do this depends on the operating system context; perhaps this will be (semi)- automated in later releases of the musicraft package.

By clicking on the tabs abc2abc abc2midi abcm2ps ps2pdf and abcm2svg of theerror/diagnostic output panel you can check whether musicraft is finding and executing the 'command line tools' properly. If not, you can find the version of these tools for your system from the sites listed under ABCplus music notation below. After doing this, you omit the-S when starting musicraft and it will use your specially installed versions,

Two alternative start-up scripts are also included. These illustrate how, with a little python knowledge, one can adjust ('tweak') the behaviour of musicraft:

• musicraft_custom.py customizes the PDF output filename to include the current date.
• musicraft_cello.py customizes extra [keyboard snippets](##### keyboard snippets) (see below!).

Both of the above also contain a number of disabled customizations for illustration purposes.

Debugging

Musicraft writes some 'on the go' diagnostic information to the System tab of the error/diagnostic panel. Actual error oinformation (more properly: information written to stderr as opposed to stdout) is written in italics.

On the go' diagnostic information can be obtained by setting...

• `MUSICRAFT_DBG = 1

... before starting musicraft. Inevitably, perhaps, the choice of what debug info to output is governed by my issues encountered recently, not by your issues encountered today, so this is not guaranteed to be helpful!

This 'debug' mode causes standard output and standard error to be written to the shell from which musicraft was started, not to the System tab of the error/diagnostic panel. This is because the latter disappears without trace if musicraft bombs out owing to an unforseen exceptions. [This behaviour is under review.] Debug info ouput can also be requested by -D or --debug on the command line - or explicitly suppressed by -ND or --no-debug. These overrule any setting of MUSICRAFT_DBG from the environment.

The 'command line programs' write their output to the approprite tabs of the panel: Abc2abc Abc2midi and Abcm2svg. The last of these actually relates to abcm2ps and is so named because we always use it to produce SVG not PS output.

Musicraft was originally designed to work with Qt4 via either PyQt4 or PySide. This software is however now deprecated in favour of Qt5 via either PySide2 or PyQt5. Accordingly, Musicraft has been reworked to support these; This behaviour can be selected by settinging an environment variable:

• MUSICRAFT_QT = PySide2
• MUSICRAFT_QT = PyQt5

Not overruling this setting is treated as equivalent to...

• MUSICRAFT_QT = PyQt5

Important note regarding 'Qt' dependencies:

The dependencies of musicraft are defined assuming PyQt5 will be used. If you want to use PySide2, you will need to install this separately. This is because I had difficulty installing PySide2; you, of course, may be more successful!

window layout

Before you start inputting music to Musicraft, it is a good idea to tweak the window layout to suit your monitor layout:

• If you have just one screen, first click the full-screen button, then if necessary use the mouse to to drag the vertical line which divides the text area from the score area so that each is wide enough.

• If you have two displays next to each other, you may want to drag the whole musicraft window to straddle the two, so that one shows the abc source code, the other the score.

• With two or more displays, you may want to 'undock' one or more of the three panels by dragging their top line(s) - identified by the texts Editor, styled output and error/diagnostic output to an empty area of one of the screens.

warning: if you stretch the styled output window too much you may encounter 'extra' unresponsive scroll-bars. This is a bug which I am having difficulty fixing!

ABCplus music notation

It is unlikely that you have got to this stage without knowing at least something about ABCplus music notation. Even so, it's always good to have some resources at hand. The list below will get you started and lead you to more goodies:

• http://abcplus.sourceforge.net/
• http://moinejf.free.fr/abcm2ps-doc/features.xhtml
• https://sourceforge.net/projects/abcplus/files/Abcplus/abcplus_en-2019-12-20.zip

Typing in your tune(s)

Assuming you are familiar with ABCplus notation (if not, see previous section!) you can now simply type the ABCplus code into the Editor panel. The score panel will change as you type. In doing this, musicraft auto-saves your abc code into a temporary directory and derives one or more temporary svg files from it. Nnonetheless, you must not forget to save your source code regularly with control-S (or via the file menu). By each such explicit save action, musicraft derives not only svg file(s) but also a postcript file with suffix '.ps'. The derived '.ps' is then used immediately to produce a PDF.

keyboard snippets

For most purposes, abcplus is concise; that's waht I like most about it! Some annotations, can however, be a bit long to type in. This is where keyboared snippets come in. When, while typing in a tune, you press the TAB key, musicraft will look at the previous 'word'. If this word is a known key in the dictionary of snippets, the coreesponding value will be substitued for the word, e.g. 'MR' ecomes '"_molto rit."'. See AbcHighlighter.snippets in ```musicraft/abcraft/syntax.py. . If, however, the word is not a key of snippets`, it will simply be encloses in exclamation warks. E.g. 'ff' becomes '!ff!' - less of a saving but still worth it. The snippet facility is also intended to support two-part snippets, e.g. 'cr' for '!<(!' and a subsequent '!<)!' but this is not fully implemented.