Music, Programming and a Cat

First Contact! A screenshot from falkTX, who was able to run Laborejo on his Ubuntu/KDE system. Very nice.

Chordsymbols, Figured Bass and Lyrics. A new screenshot packed with features!You can see Laborejo and the generated PDF side by side here. The music itself is obvious nonsense, like always in this developer blog :)

The little numbers under the lower track are Figured Bass, a baroque abbreviation for chords. For compactness they are not vertically aligend in Laborejo, but once exported they look “correct”.

Chordsymbols for Pop, Folk and Jazz can be placed over the notes.

Finally you can see the new Lyric Frame in the lower half of the window. You can enter lyrics with Lilypond Syntax here (to create melismatic music). Multiple verses are possible. The new line in the text window indicates the next verse, a simple, plain and robust concept.
Each of the tracks can have its own lyrics. If you move the cursor to another track you see the lyrics in the edit frame. And they can be placed below or above the track by checking “Lyrics Above” in the properties frame on the right side.

This is work in progress so you can’t see the lyrics in the track/notation editor yet, but it is planned.

Better beaming with Time Signatures! (Energize!)

Last time you saw that notes shorter than eigths have now beams instead of each note having a flag.It got even better:
Beaming now knows what time it is and presents a more musical picture.

Todays screenshot is just random music, twice! The notes in both tracks are identical but the time signature is different. Beginners, bad teachers and math-people often say “there is no difference between 3/4 and 6/8” but this is not true. 6/8 is two times 3/8 and 3/4 is three times 1/4 and Laborejos beaming shows the difference.

Unlike key signatures time signatures are logical and follow strict rules, not only conventions. This means that Laborejo will find the correct beaming automatically.
Still to do: 7/8 works but there are three ways to split the metrical data. Additive Time Signatures like (3+2+2)/8 are not implemented yet. As soon as they are beaming will know what to do.

Beaming: Roflcopter Solo

Beaming makes everything look nicer. It is done automatically and, as always, independent of the PDF generation. Beaming in Laborejo itself has the only purpose to group notes so that you have better orientation and can work faster.

You can also see a few new track properties in the frame on the left side. Several print and midi options like the instrument name or the sounding instrument/patch.

Barlines can now be switched off and on. This is purely a GUI feature. You still can use commands like “Cursor go one measure right” and the status-bar will still show you in which measure you are currently. Why? Sometimes you just want to scribble melodies down and barlines get in your way. Or you want to write down renaissance music (or earlier) where there are no barlines at all.

Although for the print-out/pdf it is not necessary to switch gui barlines on and off at all. It is independet, after all. And Laborejo is designed to not get in your way! Even with barlines you don’t have to worry about measure boundaries, you can still just type notes, one after another. Overfull measures are impossible, and no note of yours will be touched (as in “spitted and tied over the barline”. You can enable that for the printout, though).

I think the main reason why I did this is because it was easy and fast to program :).

Screenshot: Track Properties Frame, Custom Key Signatures. Looks like a DAW now :)

You can see the Track Properties frame here. Internal, Print/Lilypond and Playback/Midi settings can be changed here.
There is also a new dialog, one of many, that can create custom Key Signatures. Any combination of naturals/flats/sharps with any root note.

Leave a comment or join #laborejo on irc.freenode.org if you have any questions or, indeed, comments.

Only three visitors per day?! Here is a picture of a cat!