Music Tracker

Training -- July 17, 2008

A.M. Kuchling
amk @ amk.ca

Goal of the web: provide an easy way to link to and talk about things.

We now need to extend the idea to other, more specialized areas and media types.

Music Tracker is for posting and displaying brief excerpts of musical scores, making it possible to display and discuss them in weblogs.

Screenshot

[Screenshot of Music Tracker site]
  • Input format: ABC, a text-based notation originally designed for folk music:
    • Single-voice
    • Human-readable and -writable (unlike, say, MusicXML).
  • Rendered as SVG and embedded in the web page.
    • AJAXy functionality: snippet is updated as you edit the text field.
    • The top page shows a scroll of recently-posted items.
  • Written atop the Google Application Engine.
    • Should provide good scalability,
    • Limits what we can do -- SVG to PNG translation would be very difficult. Generating SVG is straightforward.

Future Work

  • Completing the ABC parser and renderer.
  • Supporting non-SVG browsers (= IE).
  • Drag-and-drop editing via a JavaScript application.
  • Converting music to MIDI or other playable form.

Bazaar repository: code.amk.ca/music-tracker

These slides: www.amk.ca/talks/2008-07-17

Author's e-mail: amk @ amk.ca

  • Completing the ABC parser and renderer.
  • Supporting non-SVG browsers (= IE).
    • Could be done as an SVG-to-PNG translation step.
    • Possible to render as HTML, w/ fancy absolute-positioning CSS?
  • Drag-and-drop editing via a JavaScript application.
  • Converting music to MIDI or other playable form.