Phil asked in passing "(Do any player programs other than BarFly currently
implement part-order playing in multivoice tunes? If so, how do they do
it?)"
Muse doesn't. When I wrote the playing stuff I couldn't figure out how P:
was supposed to interact with repeat structures, let alone voices - so I
threw up my mental hands and moved on. This despite the fact that I've
played in a barn dance band for 20 years where we routinely say things like
"one more A to finish" or more critically, when someone has failed to
correctly count repeats, we bellow "*B!*".
Actually, as I type this I think I almost (see below) see what I should have
done. If you regard A, B etc not as labels identifying parts of a tune, but
as labels in the playback order then it's just a "goto" statement. If it
lies within some repeat structure then it means goto that point and play as
though we are part way through the FIRST time that point is encountered in
the playback that we would have without the Ps. This means that in the
context of
|: feed | feed |1 deaf :|2 face || beef |
there would be no way to get it to play "feed face beef" as that requires
picking things up on the second time through.
"feed feed face beef" would just be possible by putting a label at the end
of the 1 section
|: feed | feed |1 deaf [P:B] :|2 face || beef |
And now the "almost" bit: Encountering another label presumably means "stop
playing". But what about encountering the same label again? Is the rule
that if the label encountered is the next label in the playback sequence
then just ignore it and keep going, but otherwise stop and "goto" the next
label in the sequence, if any?
For instance
|: [P:A] feed | feed |1 deaf :|2 face || [P:B] beef |
Does an instruction to play AA mean playing
feed feed deaf feed feed face?
Does an instruction to play AB mean playing
feed feed deaf beef?
That second one looks unfortunate as when you ask a musician to play AB they
would normally play the *last* version of A - but I can't see the algorithm,
especially as playing not AB but AC would mean to a folk musician "play
whichever version of A you think leads best into the C music"
What exactly does BarFly do?
In the context of a GUI editor, labelling all the voices is not hard - I
could provide a command that will label all the voices with one "point and
shoot" command.
Laurie
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