This project aims to create an application which manages a person's music collection - that is, sheet music, the visual representation of a composed piece of music.
The system works by:
- taking a folder
- finding all the musicXML (.xml) files in that folder, and all the zipped musicXMl files in the folder (.mxl)
- unzipping all the mxl files
- running through each XML file and pulling out relevant metadata: this is defined in one of the closed issues under metadata milestone
- cataloging the data in a SQLite db in the folder
- loading stuff useful to the user:
- a list of all pieces, which can be sorted by several methods
- a list of all playlists made by the user
- a list of all playlists generated by the system, organised by what category of metadata they came from
- a user can then click on any of the pieces or search for them. On click the system:
- loads info about the piece and displays it
- also checks for whether it's in any user created playlists and displays that
- if the user is connected to the internet, further stuff happens:
- the system polls the MuseScore API for a list of files and compares them against the previous list it fetched from the API.
- If there's any new ones, it downloads them, unzips them, parses them for data, chucks that in the SQL DB and then deletes the XML and MXL files to save space.
Currently the system is documented using github issues and the reports stored in Documentation. Most of these were for submission to my degree, but they give a good overview for new users and are pitched at a compsci level so that people without knowledge of music can learn a bit and understand it without prior knowledge of sheet music. Once I have a bit of time to do more writing there will be a proper documentation site with instructions on setting up
- Language: Python 3.4.
- GUI: PyQt4, with pdfs done by poppler on Linux and Mac, default pdf viewer on windows.
- Rendering: Lilypond via MuseParse
- Input format: MusicXML
- Output Format for rendering: PDF via lilypond
- APIs used: MuseScore - keys are individual except for the release build which will use my API key. Please contact the musescore developers for a key if you need to debug anything network related.
You can find the latest installer scripts for each platform by clicking releases. You will also need to install Lilypond.