What is FreeDots?
FreeDots is a Free Software project to enable blind users to translate musical notation into Braille music.
Currently, the only input file format supported is MusicXML, a widely used standard for distributing musical notation digitally. MusicXML can be read and written by many different types of musical notation software, like OMR programs, music notation editing software and conversion tools to and from other formats. A detailed list of software supporting MusicXML can be found here.
Requirements
- Python:
- pygame
- setuptools
GUI
FreeDots does also feature a GUI fronteend to view (and in the future also edit) braille music.
ChangeLog
- 0.3:
- Support for opening MusicXML files directly off the Internet (URL support).
- 0.2:
- Support for reading compressed MusicXML files (.mxl).
- Set sensitivity of some GUI elements appropriately.
- Changes towards Python 3000 support.
- Add the beginnings for a user manual in doc/ (DocBook XML 4.5):
- (X)HTML, PDF (A4) and text versions are generated.
- All formats do support braille patterns (including PDF).
- Help wanted from doc writers!
- 0.1beta5:
- Add a GTK based GUI that can be used with Orca:
- The editor is context sensitive, objects are played back as you move the cursor around.
- Proof-of-concept note editing is implemented as octave up/down. See the Edit menu.
- Add a GTK based GUI that can be used with Orca:
- 0.1beta4:
- Rewrite timepart.xsl in a few lines of Python, eliminating the need for XSLT.
- Replace lxml by ElementTree and ship ElementTree with Freedots. This should make is vastly easier to run FreeDots on Windows.
- Chord interval direction is now dependant on the clef.
- First support for music on two staves (keyboard music).
- Fix title display of wikifonia.org lead-sheets.
- 0.1beta3:
- Correct playback of MusicXML files with varying divisions.
- Support for the MusicXML transpose element.
- Support for fingering information if correctly encoded in MusicXML.
- Support for accent, breath, staccato, staccatissimo and tenuto articulation marks.
- Started work on lyric elements.
- Cleanend up and refactored the core code a bit.
Download
FreeDots is also hosted on the PyPI Package index. Please refer to the FreeDots project page at PyPI for more details.
Installation
On Microsoft Windows
To be able to run FreeDots you need Python and a few python libraries. Simply install all the programs linked below before proceding.
Now just extract the freedots tarball somewhere, change to that directory and run setup.py with your python interpreter.
For example: "\python25\python.exe setup.py install".
Known Problems
Since FreeDots is a very young project, there is still a lot to do. This is a list of things that are known to not work at the moment.
- The editing GUI does not work on Windows in an accessible way since GTK is not accessible on Windows yet. gui.py probably needs a rewrite in wxPython to be more cross-platform compatible.
- While there is score editing prototyped, saving MusicXML files is not supported yet. Full MusicXML 2.0 compatiblility will be hard to achieve given the current architecture. There are ways to improve this.
- MIDI files are only played interactively, there is no option to save a MIDI file from a MusicXML file yet (simple to do, just no demand so far).
- The manual (intended as a brief general introduction to braille music and as a user manual for Freedots) is missing a lot of content.
Feedback
FreeDots development is mostly based on enthusiasm. FreeDots will continue to stay free of charge for everyone. However, enthusiam is also sparked by something. If we know that we have users that use and like FreeDots, we are more likely to improve it even more! Additionally, FreeDots is Free Software, you are invited to contribute code or documentation to make it an even more useful project than it already is.