Linux music notation software
As soon as I went online looking for banjo music, I ran into music stored
at .tef files. I groaned, fully expecting the only way to cope with
these would be some windows software (and I don't run windows, never have,
nor do I intend to).
ABC notation
This is a scheme that uses your text editor to prepare a file representing music
in abc notation. Software exists to convert these files to nicely typeset music
or even midi sound files. See the ABC notation homepage.
This has been in use since late 1991 and mac and windows people use it as well as linux folks.
See also Jef's page where Tkabc is hosted.
Also, the ABC plus project.
NtEd
This is part of Fedora Core 9. Professor Anders previously wrote a program called
NoteEdit.
This project has been abandoned, with its better aspects being preserved in
NtED.
NtEd if basically a WYSIWYG music score editor, as is MuseScore.
TEF files
One option is to run TablEdit under Wine. It can export MusicXML files, which can then be fed into
various linux packages. Apparently TuxGuitar can read .tef
files. TuxGuitar seems to be written in Java, and is available via yum for fedora.
When I installed it (5/11/2009), it pulled in java-1.6.0-openjdk and rhino:
Installing:
tuxguitar x86_64 1.1-1.fc9 updates-newkey 5.1 M
Installing for dependencies:
java-1.6.0-openjdk x86_64 1:1.6.0.0-0.25.b09.fc9 updates-newkey 27 M
libswt3-gtk2 x86_64 1:3.3.2-12.fc9 updates-newkey 4.0 M
rhino noarch 1.6-0.1.r5.1jpp.2.fc7 fedora 477 k
tzdata-java noarch 2009e-3.fc9 updates-newkey 170 k
And now this seems to work pretty nicely actually. I go to File->Import and that selects the TEF file
plugin to open my .tef files and displays them quite nicely.
Articles
Have any comments? Questions?
Drop me a line!
Tom's home page / tom@mmto.org