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Comment by ww520 | Hacker News Reader

This is pretty cool. Good work!

Couple things come to mind.

1. Is there a way to play a selected segment of the music rather than the whole file? While composing, replaying a segment over and over again is quite common. Don't want to start from the beginning every single time.

2. Is there a way to produce music sheet (PDF or PNG) from the source? There would be really useful.

3. Is there a way to format the notes into measures? I know the | is optional and ignored. Can the program do reformat and automatically divides the notes into measures?

4. Emacs integration would be great. Using Emacs to edit. Do ^X^E to execute the program to play the selected segment.

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Thanks for the kind words!

1. I do have plans to implement start and end points for playback, either in the form of minute/second markings or the already-implemented "markers" you can place in an Alda score. I agree this is a crucial feature -- it will be very useful when working on one small part of a large score. Eventually you should be able to do something like: "alda play --file my-score.alda --start 0:30 --end chorus"

2. Not yet -- I'm hoping we'll implement a way to generate LilyPond ( http://lilypond.org ) typeset scores from Alda code.

3. My philosophy on bar lines (and the reason why Alda ignores them as if they were comments) is that they're essentially "invisible to the ears," and so they don't serve much purpose except as a way to visually organize your score file. However, in order to generate sheet music (e.g. by generating LilyPond code), we will probably end up making them significant to the parser after all. I can see how it might be useful to think of your score in terms of measures, e.g. "play a few eighth notes, then rest until the end of the measure," so I'm certainly open to the idea of implementing measures.

4. I agree, although I'm a Vim user :P

4) Just wrote https://github.com/MadcapJake/language-alda for Atom. (Atom has the great https://github.com/atom/vim-mode package and for the parent, though it seems less complete, there's https://github.com/avendael/atomic-emacs)

Also in regards to the parent's interest in having a keybind to autoplay alda files, there is https://github.com/lsegal/atom-runner and with a short snippet in your config you'll have `alt-r` recognize alda files and play them!

For the language-alda package, I'm working on integrating autocomplete support for instruments, markers and attributes. I think I can also add support for atom-runner directly through the language package too.

Between playing around with the langauge and getting tooling support in Atom, my whole Sunday was completely swallowed up! :P

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