next »

[droqen]

I desire to make a simple tool for writing music in MML.
It will be made in AS3, and as such there will be no actual filesaving mechanism. It will be able to output to text, and input from text in lieu of such.
Pictured above is the logo-type thing which I shall use for this project.

Progress on this will probably happen slowly, in between my other projects.


If I'm feeling extra adventurous,
I will allow editing visually or textually to cause changes to one another in real time! woo.

Also, I like MML because it has a good and free AS3 synthesizer.

Double also, I would not be unappreciative of someone desiring to assist. That is all.

[Triplefox]

Very interesting. I will be watching this.

[droqen]

This may interest some more than others:

Because I often use my netbook which has a touchpad which means I don't like using the mouse a whole lot, I'm going to try to allow keyboard-only controls wherever it is possible.

Besides -- flash only has input for a single mouse button. Why bother?

Although I'm not a tracker kinda guy, I used LSDJ and was awfully impressed by its control scheme. It wasn't exactly welcoming, but it definitely made sense after a bit of learnin' and it worked wonderfully with very few buttons available to it.

[JMickle]

i would definitely and pretty obviously be up for testing

[droqen]

Goalset / Milestone #1:

Allow keyboard or mouse input for a single track, with no soundy modulation (aside from long notes & rests).

Output to string (textbox)
Optional: real-time string update

Input from string (same textbox)

EDIT :: Biggest problem of the day = how to deal with input errors?

Input will occur separately from output -- thou shalt paste into the text box and choose load immediately, for if you do not, it will be overwritten by the next change you make.

Yes, it will be possible to load from MML but errors will probably screw things up. I'll skip things which I haven't programmed acceptance for yet (... where possible, anyway)

EDIT ::

What if I were to make it more like coding?
Since it's already similar to writing code, I could simply play appropriate notes on their input -- and allow you to select and play small segments. hrm

[knight]

A code like music synthesizer would be awesome.
So something like

Code:

for (int i=0;i<5;i++)
{
   notePlay(Note->A);
}

[droqen]

You should probably check out MML a bit. It's pretty compact for code but uh

it's nice for things like that.

[Triplefox]

BTW I should add my 2c on an "ideal" MML editor: A completely visual representation of the AST where you can drag around blocks that contain piano rolls or knobs that correspond 1-to-1 to the MML. Don't know if it's actually feasible to do that with the way MML is defined, though.

[pgil]

Are you using SiON for this? It sounds like an awesome idea. I've tried composing with various MML editors, and I've found them all to be pretty unintuitive. Just hearing audio feedback when writing notes would be a big improvement.

How are you going to visualize notes? The thing I like about trackers and sequencers is that notes appear on a grid, and one axis corresponds to time. You can see when a note will play.

Oh, and I'd also like to be a tester when the time comes 

[droqen]

Yeah, that's a really good point.

I think the two things that bother me most about working MML are:

1. No audio feedback on note play, and too hard to play song from a particular point in time.
2. x-axis doesn't represent time.

So they'd have to be the first problems solved, I think!

[Benjamin Soulé]

Hello guys. I'm a bit late but I made a Visual MML editor and I think you could be interested in it.
You can find it here : http://benjaminsoule.fr/tools/vmml/

[Rayiner]

Sounds awesome!