Hi. A small update for those interested: Since a few years now, I am working in my spare time on several braille music related software projects. They all have one thing in common: They are licensed under a Free and Open license which permits distribution and modification of the software in question free of charge. Or, put in other words, they follow the GNU/Linux spirit of software licensing.
The first project is FreeDots, which you can find on googlecode: http://code.google.com/p/freedots/ FreeDots can convert MusicXML files directly to braille music. It also allows very simple editing functionality, although currently just limited to entering fingerings. This feature can be thought of as an equivalent to sighted musicians putting their own fingering into a score with a pen by hand. Other notable features are the ability to play the score, and individual notes, as well as a toggle to interactively switch between bar-over-bar and section-by-section formatting without loosing the current reading position (logical cursor position is preserved). The backend engine of FreeDots has been integrated on the web by the wikifonia project: On http://www.wikifonia.org/ you can download *every* lead sheet available there in braille music format now. In the Page layout listbox, simply choose "Braille" and hit the download button. You will get a Unicode braille formatted braille music lead sheet! Check it out, wikifonia has thausands of lead sheets these days, and you can benefit from the work of the sighted community directly by being able to download lead sheets in braille music code automatically transcribed for you. One other porject I have just started is called bmc, the braille music compiler: Its aim will be the reverse of what FreeDots currently does: translating braille music code to various well-known formats like MIDI and MusicXML. bmc is currently under heavy development and is not ready for end users yet, but the progress I've made in the last few weeks is pretty promising. For instance, value disambiguation is finally done and working great. Full measure in accord, partial measures and partial measure in accord are all implemented as they should, no shortcuts, no compromises. If you are into programming and braille music, give it a look here: http://github.com/mlang/bmc/ If you are interested in joining one of these projects as a developer or contributor, drop me a private mail. P.S.: FreeDots and bmc are both licensed under the GNU General Public License. That basically means you are free to modify the programs and redistribute your modifications, as long as you keep the license intact. You are, however, explicitly forbidden to reuse GPL code in a commercial software product of your own if it is not licensed under the same license. Musical greetings -- CYa, ⡍⠁⠗⠊⠕ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
