Musical MIDI Accompaniment
File Conversion, Editor Modes and Other Aids
More Documentation
For our Spanish-speaking users, David Asorey Álvarez has done a tutorial in Spanish. (Unfortunately, this appears to be a dead link ... anyone?)
A translation of the Tutorial is available in French.
One of our friends is translating the reference manual to French.
He has chapters 1-12 up at: http://linuxmao.org//tiki-list_file_gallery.php?galleryId=29.
I have written
some short essays
about MMA that contain some tutorial level material.
Editors
I used the kate text editor for awhile (I'm back to using emacs) and wrote a syntax highlighting file. The program katexml-py will generate the necessary xml file for kate. After downloading the file, run it with the command ./katexml.py >mma.xml, install the xml file with the others that kate uses (probably in the directory /usr/share/apps/katepart/syntax). This file can be improved—your help is solicited.
San Vu Ngoc has created a very nice Emacs mode for MMA. He is kindly hosting this file on his site: MMA Emacs.
I'm far from a expert on elisp. Heck, I'm not even a novice! But that still leaves me impressed by mma.el ... it actually parses the output of “mma -Dk” and keeps its internal tables current so we don't need a new version each time we add keywords to MMA. Cool.
I've finally convinced myself that emacs-is-not-evil and really wish I'd done so years ago. Really, the learning curve isn't that bad. And the upshot is that modes (like this one) are very useful. So, if you aren't using emacs yet, do consider it.
Hervé Christol uses the SciTE editor, a free source code editor for win32 and linux, and has written a nice highlighter. It's available on his site at mmaScite. Thank you!
Converters
I use the music notation program
MUP
for my notation needs. The program mup2mma is a short Python
program which aids in extracting the chords for MMA. See the notes
at the top of the program for operational details.
There are literally thousands of .sty files for Yamaha keyboards. At the urging
of Kara I wrote a conversion program which takes an existing .sty
file in the SFF1 format and
converts it to MMA. This is not a perfect conversion, but a lot of the
files sound pretty good. Included in the archive is the program and a short
README which is the only documentation.
This is a small (10k) compressed Unix/Linux .gz file: ys2mma-0.7.tar.gz.
Our friend Alain Brenzikofer has written a nice Perl script to
extract MMA chord files from “Band In A Box” files. Get his
biabconverter
and have fun!
Gek S. Low has written a program to extract chords from abc2mps generated
ABC files. Neat part is that it'll also create the correct lines for
the MMA script to include melody lines generated by abc2midi. Cool. Get it at
abc2mma.
Musescore users should like this musescore plugin: https://github.com/berteh/BandInMuseScore/ which will generate MMA
files from your favorite compositions. Thanks Bertrand!
Graphical User Interfaces
Gek S. Low has also written a nice little GUI front-end. He refers to it as a “lazy man's” program to make it easier for folks to enter simple chord progressions. It's written in python and tkinter. Get it at lemma.
Another interesting GUI project is LinuxBand. You'll need the Jack interface installed for this to work. There is a package for Arch Linux at https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/linuxband.
Other Music Links of Interest
HitSquad has hundreds of links to sites on the internet with various musical tools. Covers Windows, Mac and Linux.
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This page was last modified on 2024-03-21 |