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mirabilos's avatar
improve MML documentation and rendering thereof
mirabilos authored 
we don’t distinguish between BSD extensions and FlopPI-Music ones
any more, given mmllint outputs BASIC MML, so drop extension note
about barline (which BSD ignores already anyway)
0f2fe94e
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mirabilos's avatar 0f2fe94e
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Name Last commit Last update
examples
mmllib
test
.gitignore
CHANGELOG.rst
LICENCE
MANIFEST.in
MMLFILE.rst
README.rst
run.py
setup.py
README.rst

MMLlib — Modern library for handling Music Macro Language

About

MMLlib is a pure Python implementation of functionality related to the Music Macro Language as implemented by Microsoft® GW-BASIC® and compatibles, which is its most common form, also implemented by the PC speaker driver in Linux and BSD, with a number of extensions and changes:

  • | denotes a bar line, ignored by the Linux/BSD driver
  • support for multiple (parallel) instrument tracks
  • a per-file header with work metadata (optional)
  • lines starting with a # are comments
  • the alias ~ (itself a BSD extension) is not supported

The library currently contains functions to:

  • parse an (extended) MML file into metadata and individual tracks
  • return a normalised form of the MML that does not make use of the extensions and should PLAY on the original BASIC interpreter
  • a duration estimate and the number of tracks are added to the metadata
  • return a list of tuples (frequency, duration) to play (in a threaded interpreter, such as Floppi-Music)
  • bar lines are indicated separately as integer 1 in the playlist
  • return an event-oriented list of measures / bars across all tracks; each measure has a duration and a list of time-fixed tone on/off events; facilitates playing in non-threaded interpreters and, possibly, MIDI export
  • export (extended) MML to MusicXML
  • which can be imported by e.g. MuseScore to…
    • double-check the MML score for mistakes in a visual representation
    • play, arrange, etc. the music
    • beautify the score to print it as sheet music
    • export into other formats or share on their website
  • export (currently only the first track of) MML to an NXC program
  • check tracks for synchronisation error
    • missing tracks, i.e. with 0 bars
    • missing bars (can only be detected at the end, of course)
    • missing notes within a bar, relative to other tracks
  • play a playlist (parsed MML) using PWM on GPIO pins on ESP boards under MicroPython (experimental; may not work for higher pitches)

Prerequisites

The library itself does not have any prerequisites, but argparse is used by the (optional) command-line interface.

While MMLlib is only formally supported for Python releases that are not end-of-life it’s occasionally tested that Python 2.7 and even 2.5 still work, with no guarantees though.

Testsuite

The testsuite can be run with one of the following commands:

  • with setuptools (note that this is deprecated in recent versions; use one of the other methods if it fails)
    • python3 setup.py test (3.x)
    • python setup.py test (2.5+)
  • with unittest
    • python3 -m unittest (3.x)
    • python -m unittest discover (2.7+)
  • using another suitable testsuite runner

Examples

Some example extended MML files are contained within the examples/ directory, in lieu of better documentation for the extended format, in addition to the MML format documentation.

Projects using MMLlib

Floppi-Music: Floppi-Music has MML as input format for floppy drive music on Raspberry Pi and uses MMLlib for processing. Floppi-Music is also the origin of MMLlib from before it was spun off into a separate project of its own.