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.

• 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!

1. A certain user has been facing problem with hosted web sites, so it looks like there IS need to make it work with web hosts — to be specific, ScoreRender needs to cope with the case when PHP functionas are disabled due to security reasons. It shouldn’t be hard. The hardest part is how it can work with older ImageMagick and other related software. I don’t see any solution yet.
2. IE6 PNG image transparency seems not as dead-end as I thought. With the image filter published by TwinHelix, it looks trivial to add the support for IE6. At least way better than the big fat warning with current releases.

Sounds familiar? How about this one:

Probably even starters can learn these rhythms very soon, as they are easy ones. Even people who haven’t played drum in their live can tap these rhythms with finger in no time (hey, drum games on game consoles don’t count!). But I haven’t finished: what if one need to:

• Beat these rhythms non-stop for more than 10 minutes
• Make absolutely no single error
• Play at constant speed thoughout the whole passage, without anybody noticing any tempo change

That is not so easy. This is the case for first rhythm, which comes from Ravel’s Boléro. Think about beating the same rhythm again and again and again for 12+ minutes without any error, and controlling tempo / loudness at the same time! Probably even professional drummers can’t do that at single pass. It needs undivided attention and dedication in order to achieve the result.

For 2nd rhythm, which comes from Shostakovich’s 7th Symphony, it’s not so demanding for drummer — just about 7-8 minutes instead of 12+ minutes (in Ravel’s own interpretation probably around 17 minutes). But every other element is the same: repeat the same thing over and over, non-stop, no mistake, very gradual crescendo like Boléro. And again, it’s snare drum’s call.

No, I don’t think I can devote such concentration, that’s why I give my thumbs up to these drummers.

Let me talk about Windows support first. It took me way too much time to finish it than I anticipated. There are a couple of scaring problems for using PHP on Windows.

Command execution on Windows

Under PHP documentation of system() function, people have been talking about PHP incapable of executing any command line with more than 2 double quotes, since PHP 4.3.x. So the following command line:

"C:\Program Files\ImageMagick\convert.exe" "C:\Temp Folder\1.gif" C:\1.png

Produces an instant failure (because there are 4 double quotes). And adding insult to injury: it’s not limited to system(), any other program execution functions like exec(), popen() are affected as well. Now the newest stable version is 5.2.6, guess what? Nothing changed. And people simply invented schemes to circumvent the bug, the most obvious one being using batch file, and that’s what I end up doing as well.

tempnam() stupidity on Windows

So this is an undocumented feature: tempnam() on Windows only uses 3 letter prefix and a sequentially increasing counter as suffix! Now compare with the Unix counterpart — people have been complaining how this temp file creation is a security problem on Unix, but it’s suddenly not a security problem anymore on Windows! Fantastic!

Other people have been bragging programmers not to invent their own schemes, and use native functions instead. But no way, I won’t listen to such “recommendations”!

For Philip’s Music Writer support, it is also not as straight forward as it should be, the main problem being on image conversion. No matter how I indicated sheet size in PMW source, ImageMagick invariably insists image size is 612×792 (which translates to 8.5" × 11" under 72 DPI)! And the final resulting PNG file is a 1×1 pixel dot.

Probably the problem is on PMW’s side. Normally within PostScript preamble part there is at least a declaration of %%BoundingBox, specifying its size (some even go as far as specifying %%DocumentPaperSizes and %%HiResBoundingBox); yet nothing like that exists in PostScripts produced by PMW. Anyway, that problem is temporarily fixed by forcing paper size using ImageMagick -page option.

Here is the list of more prominent changes since 0.1.x version:

1. Remove markup configuration, and adds lots more config options
2. Show statistics in dashboard
3. Clickable image showing music source
4. Start to migrate to PHP5-style classes
5. Image conversion routine redone
6. Allow clearing cache within admin page

However, to be sincere, some of the changes do make me worried, namely:

1. Requirement of PHP5: though PHP5 growth is a bit stronger after PHP4 end of life, we are still seeing 41% adoption of PHP5 only (statistics by nexen). That means half of potential users can’t upgrade…
2. Requirement of newer ImageMagick: I can’t stop cursing ImageMagick maintainers for this one. All packagers and software developers used to curse them, now I can feel the hatred in the guts too. ImageMagick can change API, compatilibility and even command line options between any minor, or even patch level releases! Damn it. Software versioning is completely meaningless for ImageMagick. As I have said before, -channel alpha no more creates alpha channel, causing all transparency rendering broken with previous release. However, not that many web servers have newest ImageMagick installed. I’d say the restriction is even more serious than PHP one. Perhaps I may need to think of another way to circumvent the problem in the coming releases.
3. Potential of XSS on showcode.php: right now showcode.php reads music fragment from POST request and dumps them only after minimal content filtering. I’m a bit worried it can be susceptible to XSS. Perhaps there is need to fire up XSS scanners in short future.

ABC:

Guido:

Mup

Lilypond

PMW:

Among all notations, Lilypond takes me the most time to get positions of various dynamics and texts right. Much time is spent on Guido one too, but documentation on Guido is considerably easier to read than Lilypond’s, and much manual layout simply can’t be done by Guido .

I have been saying that ABC notation shows promise; now I want to take back to word. It doesn’t even allow specifying text marks in arbitrary position! This is 2008, not 1988, but still. Though ABC standard version 2.0 has it, but (1) it’s a draft, and (2) which software is implementing 2.0 standard?

2008-09-28 Edit: Add Philip’s Music Writer counterpart since it is recently supported.