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Technology report

Generating musical scores with LilyPond

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By Adam Cuerden and Kirill Lokshin

Thanks to a new MediaWiki extension, editors can now use the popular LilyPond format to embed musical scores in articles. The "Score" extension, created by Alexander Klauer (GrafZahl), renders musical scores in LilyPond score notation as PNG images, and can also transform those scores into audio and MIDI files automatically. An example of the extension's output, together with the corresponding LilyPond markup, is shown below:

\relative c'' { \time 4/4 \key c \major c4 g8 g a4 g r b^> c^> r \bar "|." } \addlyrics { Shave and a hair -- cut: two bits. }
<score midi="1">\relative c'' { \time 4/4 \key c \major 
c4 g8 g a4 g r b^> c^> r \bar "|." } 
\addlyrics { Shave and a hair -- cut: two bits. }</score>

More details on the options provided by the extension can be found on its help page and MediaWiki description page. The LilyPond project also offers a variety of useful documentation, including an FAQ that explains how to use a keyboard or one of several score-based editors to create LilyPond markup that can be imported into Wikipedia articles.

In brief

  • VisualEditor continues to improve: Several new features have been added to VisualEditor, including automatic display of both "edit source" and "edit beta" links on sections, the ability to edit reference content directly from a list of footnotes, and support for Opera browsers. Soon to be supported are strikethrough and <code> markup, with mathematical markup to follow.
  • Support for new fonts: Several new fonts have recently been added to the default set available on Wikimedia projects; these include Gentium, a font meant to support Latin-script languages which use multiple diacritics; Shapour, which supports the Pahlavi script; and Old Persian, which supports, unsurprisingly, Old Persian. The fonts are not yet available on the English Wikipedia, and no date for their release has been given.
  • Innovative uses for Wikidata: Gerard Meijssen has written a series of blog posts highlighting innovative uses of Wikidata. The selected projects include automatically creating family trees, automatically filling out infoboxes, using Wikidata to identify people in pictures and even automatically-generated multilingual factsheets.
  • Tech news: As always, tech-related posts are also located on Meta.
  • PNG thumbnailing improved: The thumbnailing of PNG files larger than 35 megapixels has been improved, helping to address an issue where uploading a lossless copy of a large image would result in a failure to create a thumbnail, giving the unfortunate impression that the file was corrupted.
  • MIME search tool enabled: The MIME search tool (Special:MIMESearch), which allows users to generate lists of files according to their MIME type, has been enabled on all Wikimedia projects following a series of performance improvements.
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Re Special:Mimesearch - Its not really meant for normal users. Its also not very useful in general (Getting a list of all jpg files is pretty useless when there are millions of them). Anything in particular you want me to document about it (and any particular place you'd expect to find documentation about it)? It pretty much does what it's name is. If you happen to know the MIME type for a file, you can get a list of all files of that type. For example, we recently started to allow wav files on commons - commons:Special:MIMESearch/audio/wav gets a list of them. I should note, special:mimesearch is not a new feature, it was just rewritten to have better performance. Previously it was just turned off on wikimedia wikis. Additionally it doesn't support wildcards at the moment, so you can't just get all "audio" files, you have to look at each type individually. Bawolff (talk) 23:00, 19 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It could use a list of the filetypes that can be searched for, or at least the types, e.g. image/, audio/, etc. I realise it's not the most useful search tool. Adam Cuerden (talk) 23:11, 19 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
In theory you could search for any mime type (there are literally thousands). In practise there are very few actually in use on commons - commons:Commons:MIME_type_statistics. Bawolff (talk) 00:08, 21 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Lilypond section - MediaWiki link is dead and goes nowhere. Apwoolrich (talk) 06:31, 20 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Lilypond section FAQ - Section "How do I learn the syntax?" has a link to a Tutorial which is dead and goes nowhereApwoolrich (talk) 18:21, 22 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Has anyone tried using LilyPond to put sheet music on WikiSource? —Ynhockey (Talk) 08:29, 26 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    Yes. There was a bug until very recently that prevented long works. However, Wikisource has a few things like "Accent" in A Dictionary of Music and Musicians or "Yankee Doodle" in The Child's Own Music Book. For a more complicated piece, which is still a work in progress, see National Anthems of the Allies, page 17 for Kimigayo (The Japanese National Anthem of 1917) - AdamBMorgan (talk) 11:56, 26 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    Thanks. After years of not editing WikiSource I just realized that I have no idea how to edit WikiSource with the new stuff that's been added since :) It is very cool though, I intend to learn eventually and add some PD piano scores. —Ynhockey (Talk) 07:57, 27 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Is there a tutorial on how to adapt an existing lilypond script to run in the score tags? I tried in vain to make Gymnopedie No 1 work. I don't seem to see the score tag associated with the Yankee Doodle example above. A direct link please.(found the score example) Shyamal (talk) 14:01, 26 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
This is a new feature, and, frankly, the documentation is still abyssmal. I believe most of the documentation presumed the user would be typing in the LilyPond by hand. This is never going to happen except for the shortest scores. Adam Cuerden (talk) 14:57, 26 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • PNG thumbnailer enhancements+fixes - too bad this did not include a fix for resizing animated PNGs while retaining the animation. Shyamal (talk) 16:04, 26 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • PNGs don't have animation. I think you're thinking GIF. Adam Cuerden (talk) 17:37, 26 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
      • @Shyamal and Adam Cuerden: Actually, there's a format called "APNG" (Animated PNG) which Firefox and Opera support (but Chrome, Internet Explorer, most others don't) which is considerably better than GIF for animations; I created bug 53167 just last week to provide a way of falling back from APNGs to GIFs for users whose browsers don't support them. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 18:10, 26 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
          • @Jdforrester (WMF) and Adam Cuerden: Animated PNGs extend the PNG specification in a such a way that older software that deal with PNG will show just the first frame. I am guessing that the problem has to do with the failure to resize the remaining frames. We have quite a few on commons:Category:Animated_PNG (the few "thumbnails" that are animated are because they were made at that size) Shyamal (talk) 02:25, 27 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
            • Yes that's correct. You can use APNG in articles provided you specify the full sized image, and not a thumbnail (There should be a warning on the image description page of any APNG image). However APNGs are not supported in all browsers. Bawolff (talk) 05:11, 31 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]


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