alda: A Clojure repository from SilverMaple

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                                               ~ alda ~

a music programming language for musicians

Installation | Docs | Changelog | Contributing

( )

New to Alda? You may be interested in reading this blog post as an introduction.

Inspired by other music/audio programming languages such as PPMCK, LilyPond and ChucK, Alda aims to be a powerful and flexible programming language for the musician who wants to easily compose and generate music on the fly, using naught but a text editor. Alda is designed in a way that equally favors aesthetics, flexibility and ease of use, with (eventual) support for the text-based creation of all manner of music: classical, popular, chiptune, electroacoustic, and more!

Features

Easy to understand, markup-like syntax
Perfect for musicians who don't know how to program and programmers who don't know how to music
Represent scores as text files and play them back with the alda command-line tool
Interactive REPL lets you type Alda code and hear the results in real time
Underlying Clojure DSL allows you to use Alda directly in your Clojure project.
Inline Clojure code allows you to hack the Gibson and write scores programmatically
Create MIDI music using any of the instruments in the General MIDI Sound Set

TODO

Define and use waveform synthesis instruments
Import MIDI files
Export to MusicXML for inter-operability with other music software
A more robust REPL, tailor-made for editing scores interactively
A plugin system allowing users to define custom/unofficial syntax in Alda scores

If you're a developer and you'd like to help, come on in -- the water's fine!

Syntax example

piano: o3
g8 a b > c d e f+ g | a b > c d e f+ g4
g8 f+ e d c < b a g | f+ e d c < b a g4
<< g1/>g/>g/b/>d/g

For more examples, see these example scores.

Installation

You must have Java 7+ installed on your system in order to run Alda.

(Chances are, you already have a recent enough version of Java installed.)

Mac OS X / Linux

Go to the latest release page and download alda.
Make the file executable:
```
  chmod +x alda
```
Make alda available on your $PATH:

Using /usr/local/bin here as an example; you can use any directory on your $PATH.
```
mv alda /usr/local/bin
```

Windows

Go to the latest release page and download alda.exe.
Make the alda command available by moving alda.exe to your system root path:
```
  C:\> move alda.exe %SystemRoot%
```

Updating Alda

Once you have Alda installed, you can update to the latest version at any time by running:

alda update

MIDI soundfonts

Default JVM soundfonts usually are of low quality. We recommend installing a good freeware soundfont like FluidR3 to make your MIDI instruments sound a lot nicer. For your convenience, there is a script in this repo that will install the FluidR3 soundfont for Mac and Linux users.

If you're a Windows user and you know how to install a MIDI soundfont to the Java Virtual Machine, please let us know!

To install FluidR3 on your Mac or Linux system, clone this repo and run:

scripts/install-fluidr3

This will download FluidR3 and replace ~/.gervill/soundbank-emg.sf2 (your JVM's default soundfont) with it.

Editor Plugins

For the best experience when editing Alda score files, install the Alda file-type plugin for your editor of choice.

Don't see a plugin for your favorite editor? Write your own and open a Pull Request to add it here! :)

Demo

To play a file:

alda play --file examples/bach_cello_suite_no_1.alda

To play arbitrary code:

alda play --code "piano: c6 d12 e6 g12~4"

To start an Alda REPL:

alda repl

Documentation

Alda's documentation can be found here.

Contributing

PRs welcome! See: CONTRIBUTING.md

👏 👏 👏 A big shout-out to our contributors! 👏 👏 👏

Support, Discussion, Comaraderie

License

Distributed under the Eclipse Public License version 1.0.

SilverMaple/alda