blog.humaneguitarist.org

I just saw the posting below in my email today. I'm certainly going to see if I can submit something on MXMLiszt …

Call for articles: Music information retrieval (MIR) special issue

_OCLC Systems & Services: International Digital Library Perspectives_ (OSS:IDLP) will be publishing a special issue on music information retrieval (MIR) and libraries. The editor is looking for articles that articulate the planning, development, testing, systems work, marketing, etc. related to MIR, as well as the challenges of providing access to MIR materials. Articles can be of any length, and figures and screen shots are encouraged. OSS:IDLP is a peer-reviewed journal.

If you are interested in contributing, please send the editor your name, a short proposal of the topic, and a tentative title for the article. Deadline for proposals is September 1, 2010. Articles would be due to the editor by February 1, 2011. Any questions and proposal should be directed to the editor, not to this listserv. Thank you.

Dr. Brad Eden
Editor, _OCLC Systems & Services: International Digital Library Perspectives_
Associate University Librarian for Technical Services and Scholarly Communication
University of California, Santa Barbara
eden@library.ucsb.edu

I haven't played around with this yet but in the latest newsletter by the Noteflight crew, it seems they've added score integration into Wordpress blogs (like this one):

If you're hosting your own WordPress site, Noteflight integrates with WordPress in a couple of exciting ways. First, we now support single-signon between WordPress and Noteflight Learning Edition. This means you can set up a Learning Edition community with Noteflight, and let every user on your WordPress site seamlessly access a matching account on Learning Edition without ever needing to sign in separately. All your WordPress users will also be able to see scores shared within that community. Second, Noteflight supports a nifty standard called OEmbed, that allows you to simply paste a Noteflight score link into WordPress and have the embedded score appear as if by magic. (You have to configure your WordPress site to tell it that this is OK.)

When I test this out, I'll post on this topic again. But for now I really just needed to put this on my blog to have a record of this news, given that I'd already forgotten that it was in my email box.

If anyone's reading and is interested: last week the Code4Lib Journal published an article of mine entitled "AudioRegent: Exploiting SimpleADL and SoX for Digital Audio Delivery".

The article is a little overview of AudioRegent and SimpleADL and how they are utilized at the University of Alabama Libraries, where I work.

from http://journal.code4lib.org/mission:

"The Code4Lib Journal exists to foster community and share information among those interested in the intersection of libraries, technology, and the future."

Due to some problems with offering links to PDF files and such that were in WordPress' default upload folder, I've had to move all images and files I offer for download into a new folder – one that is not a subfolder to WordPress, the blogging software that drives this blog.

Therefore, if anyone's linked to or bookmarked any graphics, PDF, or XML files, etc. offered on this blog, your old links will be broken.

In other words, a file called "foo.txt" that had been at

http://blog.humaneguitarist.org/wp-content/uploads/foo.txt

would now be located at

http://blog.humaneguitarist.org/uploads/foo.txt

All links to these files within my blog posts themselves should now be correctly updated.

I'm sorry for any inconvenience.

MXMLiszt version 0.9.0 is now available for download.

MXMLiszt is a web-based delivery and search/retrieval environment for MusicXML files and their manifestations.

MXMLiszt was created in order to complete a Master’s in Library and Information Science at the University of Alabama under the direction of Dr. Steven L. MacCall.

The documentation and source-code download links are available here.

The accompanying research paper, “Beyond Images: Encoding Music for Access and Retrieval” can be accessed here.

As of June, 2010 the live demo of MXMLiszt can be accessed at:

http://opensourcelibrarian.org/MXMLiszt

MXMLiszt is licensed under the BSD software license.

From the latest edition (issue #18) of the Lilypond Report:

Conference sightings!

(by Valentin Villenave)

Reinhold appeared at the Linux Audio Conference in Utrecht / Netherlands, presenting two papers:

• R. Kainhofer: A MusicXML Test Suite and a Discussion of Issues in MusicXML
• R. Kainhofer: OrchestralLily: A Package for Professional Music Publishing with LilyPond and LaTeX

Kainhofer wrote the musicxml2ly Python script that comes bundled with Lilypond.

This morning I read the first paper:

R. Kainhofer: A MusicXML Test Suite and a Discussion of Issues in MusicXML 2.0, Proceedings of the LAC 2010 Conference, Utrecht, 2010.

It was great. Although I would really need to known MusicXML 2.0 from memory to pick up on everything, the paper discusses some tests regarding MusicXML 2.0 and discusses some of its current limitations and the effect on import/export from other notation applications. He also discusses how  some of the format’s ambiguities create problems in trying to convert MusicXML to Lilypond.

Anyone who’s worked with MusicXML and several GUI notation apps probably knows that there are some rendering inconsistencies across different GUI music notation apps and it was good to get a better idea of the reasons behind this.

Also of interest was, from what I can gather, the limitations that the original DTD for MusicXML has imposed on MusicXML 2.0 which using an XSD schema – as backwards compatibility with earlier incarnations of MusicXML is desired. That is to say limitations of the DTD are inherited by the XSD.

Kainhofer offers some suggestions regarding any upcoming incarnations of MusicXML to deal with some of the aformentioned rendering problems as well as programmatic difficulties that arise in the occasional cases where MusicXML isn’t as explicit as it perhaps could be.

Far from a landslide of criticism however, Kainhofer concludes with this:

MusicXML is a very useful format for the extremely hard and complex task of music notation exchange. As the OSF specication has already shown, one can expect that future versions of MusicXML will clarify, solve or at least soften most of the issues we discuss here.

ps: OSF refers to the Open Score Format: http://openscoreformat.sourceforge.net/

I’ve recently been working on some documentation for a MusicXML platform I wrote called MXMLiszt – I’ll be realizing the files/source in a few weeks.

In the past I’ve used the W3C’s Amaya editor to write the HTML documentation for AudioRegent but that’s a really laborious process and requires a good bit of coding by hand even as I worked with the WYSIWYG environment.

So this time I just decided to use OpenOffice. Problem is when I did a Save As to HTML, the W3C’s Validator was giving me nearly 300 errors. Even worse is that the export was exporting the .html file and all the images in the document to the same directory. Boo. Ideally, the images should be in a subfolder for compartmentalization purposes.

Here’s what worked better: instead of saving to HTML, I used the File>Preview in Web Browser option in OpenOffice. Since Firefox is my default browser, it opened in Firefox. Then I just Firefox’s Save Page As option using the Web Page, complete type. Firefox saved the file (let’s call it "foo") as foo.htm and created a folder called "foo" that contained all the images. Sweet!

This time: only 13 errors from the WC3s’ p.o.v., all very minor errors – who knows where the other ~275 went?!

One way to cut down on errors is to make sure any image you embed in your OpenOffice .odt document has an alternative (alt) text attribute since that attribute is technically required for all images in HTML docs.

I should mention that it’s better to do this from a Linux box rather than Windows as the former uses the UTF-8 encoding and the latter Windows-1252. That’s no huge deal for non-critical documents, but it’s probably better to go with UTF-8 if you can.

Now I’m not going to waste my time hand-correcting a perfectly "valid" HTML doc for things like this. That’s mistaking the cart for the horse. I’m just an average dude trying to share some info with some folks. I’m not an institution charged with a preservation mindset. These WordPress blog entries aren’t valid either BTW …

I realize the importance of standards and sustainability but the Open Document format (foo.odt) is what I would argue is the thing to save, the HTML version being just a convenient manifestation. Secondly, if all major browsers have no trouble with the document, then from a certain p.o.v. the HTML is valid. In a sense, it’s much ado about nothing.

ps: If you’re wondering about exporting to xHTML, don’t.

… that’s a much bigger pain.

I’m trying to find out if there are – or will be – any Linux distros aimed specifically at the digital library community.

If anyone out there knows anything about this, please post a comment or drop me a line.

It just seems to me that a couple of things are happening that create major problems:

1. so called "best practices" often seem to be born more out of individualistic grant-receiving concerns than they are of truly getting several institutions on-board with effective, affordable, and shared approaches to workflows

and

2. an industry so concerned with standards and organization seems to have such little concern for organizing a do-able approach to ensure certain standards – and those "best" practices – get met in a relatively easy and affordable way.

So if there isn’t already, why isn’t there major activity to develop a Linux distro specifically for digital library functions?

If that were the case, couldn’t some of these "best" practices actually get built into the very OS people use?

All the scanning, audio-video, metadata, and delivery applications could be integrated within the OS, ensuring compatibility for whatever institutions use it.

Lists of compatible scanners and A/V equipment could get published, ensuring that people will buy equipment that will run on the OS.

Software updates could me made and get implemented in real-time across institutions.

Using all open-source software could standardize technical metadata outputs and save institutions lots of time/money – allowing them to pay for better and more talented employees.

Etc, etc, etc.

You could even call it LibOS* and use an image of Tux making a libary-shushing pose!

Maybe it’s time to stop paying lip service to collaboration and really get things moving.

"It’s the operating system, Stupid!"

*BTW: MIT appears to have had a late 90’s project that used the term LibOS, but it’s something totally different.

My Dell laptop died.

I fried the motherboard trying to reduce the fan noise … long story. The computer was a couple years old and was pretty low-powered, so I don't feel too bad.

I got a new laptop. It's a Lenovo T510 – pretty much the only laptop I could find under $1k that had a matte screen. I just can't look at those glossy screens.

Anyway, I've been playing around with having a more powerful computer so I dowloaded Microsoft's Expression Encoder 3 (formerly Windows Media Encoder). Besides the encoder, it also has a screen capture function. The free version limits you to 10 minute captures, but I'm guessing you could merge several screencasts in the Encoder component to make a longer video.

Anyway, on the downside of course is that the free version limits you to WMV (Windows Media) format. Now, there's nothing wrong with that, but it isn't the best format for widespread deployment via the Internet. But you can easily upload the video to YouTube or the much classier Vimeo. That way you can get the file converted to something that can be viewed in-line with Flash and hosted for free. And those sites offer easy ways to share and embed the videos into your blog, website, or Facebook page, etc.

Now another option if

• you have the bandwidth to host the video yourself
• and you like open standards

is to convert your WMV file to Ogg Theora via ffmpeg2theora. All I had to do was dowload the Windows version of ffmpeg2theora (version 0.26) and then place it in the same folder as my WMV file.

Let's say the file is called "foo.wmv" and that it's in my root C drive.

The WMV can be converted to Ogg Theora via the following command line code:

C:\> ffmpeg2theora-0.26 foo.wmv

I should mention that I seemed to only have any luck with this if I first set Expression Encoder to export to VC-1 Simple/WMA for the respective video/audio output formats.

Anyway, the new file called "foo.ogv" gets made and you can open and play it straight from Firefox which has native HTML 5 <video> tag support for Ogg Theora video files.

By the way, here's an interesting bit on the impending battle between Ogg Theora and the H.264 video codec.

I just got a Vimeo account.

AudioRegent Installation (Xubuntu) from nitin arora on Vimeo.

A quick tutorial on installing and running AudioRegent 1.1 in Xubuntu 9.04.

AudioRegent’s documentation is available at:
http://blog.humaneguitarist.org/projects/audioregent/

The documentation includes a download link to the program files.