On Sunday 12 February 2012 22:26:50 Ales Nosek wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> just to introduce myself. I'm a developer mainly in C++ and Java on Linux
> platform. In my free time I like to play jazz guitar. To accompany my
> improvisation practicing I has been using MIDI files generated by MMA. To
> facilitate writing of MMA files and playing them back I created LinuxBand.
> I hope you'll enjoy it.
>
> Ales
>
>
> LinuxBand is a GUI front-end for MMA (Musical MIDI
> Accompaniment)<http://www.mellowood.ca/mma/>.
> Type in the chords, choose the groove and LinuxBand will play a musical
> accompaniment for you.
>
> It’s an open source alternative to Band-in-a-Box featuring:
>
> - Easy to use graphical interface
> - Open and well-documented data format
> - Output to JACK Midi <http://jackaudio.org/> to facilitate co-operation
> with other audio applications
>
> Home page: http://linuxband.org/
> Project page: https://github.com/noseka1/linuxband
Dependencies:
1. smf (found by ./configure)
2. python-gtksourceview2 (found trying to run it--please test for this in ./configure script).
Ideas:
1. No need to require jack for simple MIDI. Maybe allow an option here. (Unfortunately, my jack is not working right now so could not play anything :-()
2. With or without jack, need to be able to set some MIDI output device. Better, program should show up as an alsa/jack MIDI source which can be connected using jack or alsa connections such as in qjackctl. (I see no provision for this in mma's CLI, however--does it do stdin->stdout?)
3. You might look at Jammer's interface. The measures/bars view show chords and styles (plus user part names and such). There is indication of tempo changes, key and time signatures and such, all in place and all visible.
A lot of space is wasted here for huge chord names. Waltzes would have three beats per bar, program still shows four.
Jammer also has a tracks pane but leave that for the future. Nice, but mixing can be done elsewhere, routing through other tooks such as kmid, ardour, etc.