Now for something special: this release is dedicated to David T. L. Wong, a seasoned free software developer in Hong Kong, also a respected and highly regarded member in local forums. Some of his major contribution to free software community include work in DMB-TH digital tv driver for linux kernel and an USENET client for Android. It was apparent that he was still posting to forums a few days ago, without apparent mentioning of any kind of problem. But all of a sudden, he’s gone. So far details are sparse, but many people are eager to help out — donation to his family members, helping in funeral and so on. There’s even a dedicated Facebook page!

Although I’m not familiar with him (no acquaintance, unlike some of my friends who do see him from time to time), wish him rest in peace and is well in heaven.

ScoreRender 0.4 workflow

Due to quite a few requests, MIDI support is starting to be implemented. Right now support for ABC notation, which makes use of abc2midi, seems to work fine, while support for Mup and PMW notation should be hard to do (they use the same program for rendering image and MIDI).

The most problematic one is Lilypond. It is not using any extra program or command line option for MIDI support, but adding a \midi{} block in input data instead before rendering. That means a special workflow for Lilypond MIDI support has to be designed, significantly different from support of any other notation.

Visual change

Now every fragment can be colored individually, unlike previous version where one can only choose black or white globally for all music fragments in the blog. Note that all fragments on this site are colored in navy blue.

Installation

WP 2.6 is required as minimum version, instead of 2.2. This allowed me to dump some old cruft which means less support headache. That’s not such a big deal, since every version before newest release unvariably contains security hole so that one would see recommendation to upgrade to newest everywhere. WordPress is notorious for its security track record (and plugins contribute a lot too); there’s a reason WordPress getting Pwnie Award.

Admin interface

1. Cache URL setting is dropped completely.
2. Temp directory and cache directory can be empty, which means using sys_get_temp_dir() and default WordPress upload folder respectively.
3. Mup registration key content is used in place of registration file.
4. The ‘Invert Image’ setting is dropped entirely, following the change in note coloring. Era of black and white is gone.
5. Background translucency is unconditionally used as well. It’s better to let IE6 die ASAP (numerous parties are calling for or even killing IE6 outright), but with Twinhelix IE6 PNG fix those unfortunated few will not feel so disgraced upon visiting your blog.
6. Incorporate jQuery Color Picker to pick note color. Finally I dropped jQuery Color Picker in favor of jscolor. Not only is jscolor much smaller in size (only 1/7 of jQuery one), the most important point is that jQuery Color Picker is very unresponsive — it requires DRAGGING in order to trigger a color change!

Content

1. Using internal shortcode support from WP, ScoreRender now supports adding attribute to enclosing tags. Individual fragment color is one; more will come later.
2. [score lang="..."] is preferred to using notation name directly as shortcode, which might be phased out later.

There are even more behind-the-scene changes as well. One can follow the changelog for a full list of changes.

• Change of license to AGPL v3.
• Moving the ‘Show Source’ setting to Contents section in admin page.
• A bug was discovered a few days ago, that notation without any program name was not deactivated correctly. Command line was still executed without the program name, which of course resulted in error. That behavior was fixed.
• Yet another fix for Lilypond, because previous one was not quite correct. Now safe mode is re-enabled for all versions of lilypond.
• Since I-don’t-know-when, ImageMagick can properly read bilevel (that is 1-bit) transparency from PostScript level 1, while it can’t before. This leads to a slight change in command line when invoking convert. Gotta create a code name called ‘curse ImageMagick’ (ok, kidding)

Why the name? I haven’t used LilyPond for a long while. Only very recently, after testing compatibility with newer WordPress release, did I discover that LilyPond safe mode command line option is completely gone, resulting in error! There IS a reason even Wikimedia people cast doubt about usage of LilyPond — notation syntax and command line can change between every minor release, and even EVERY PATCH LEVEL! In the case of safe mode option:

Go figure.

2010-02-26: OK, so the safe mode option in 2.12.x is there after all, I haven’t followed Lilypond development for a long while so don’t even notice that. It’s -dsafe now. Thus in 0.3.3 version safe mode is re-enabled. Sigh.

• When showing image only (score is not clickable, that is), also add image dimension as well, for speeding up HTML rendering.
• Fix line break when showing score source code under Windows — always convert line break to \r\n when transferring data to clipboard.
• Better auto-detection of programs. Make use of glob() under Windows and which command under Unix, with fallback if these are not available.
• Bug fix in program availability checking. If desired matching string is not found in the first line of program output, program detection would result in failure in previous versions.

• Philip’s Music Writer notation support.
• IE PNG Fix has been incorporated, which provides translucent PNG support for IE 5.5 and 6.x. No more whining when this plugin detected that your readers are using IE 5/6. Thanks to Angus Turnbull for the terrific yet easy to use IE filter!
• Zero Clipboard has been incorporated, which provides cross platform copy and paste function using Adobe Flash. No more whining again, but it’s Mozilla/Firefox and all other non-IE browsers instead. Oh yes, JavaScript and Flash must be there, of course. Thanks to jhuckaby for this great flash helper!
• Better support of installation on web hostings. This has been described in another post.
• Rendering also depends on ‘unfiltered_html‘ WordPress capability.
• Functions and files are completely refactored, so admin page is only included when needed, and PHP classes no longer access global variables as it has been done before.

As usual, please visit installation page on how to install the plugin. You will need to install extra required programs for this plugin to function as well, and they are sometimes not as easy as installing the plugin itself. If you managed this part, you can visit notation introduction page to start publishing your blog with music content!