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Firelily

A long time ago in a city far, far away... I wrote a server in perl which transformed OSC messages into png's of sheet music.

This was back when I was doing my second Bachelor's degree; this time a B.Mus. It was my final project for the 4th-year computer music seminar at the University of Victoria, Canada. It wasn't a new idea, even back in 2006. But few people had done this kind of thing, and in any case, this was just one course in a bachelor degree. I got my 'A', finished the degree, and moved on.

However, I'd mentioned the program on the lilypond-user mailing list, and some people were interested. So interested that one of them recently emailed me to ask if my program was available -- I'd previously given him a "don't redistribute this" tarball a few years ago, with the understanding that I was still working on the infrastructure and was embarrassed about some of it.

Well, it's now clear that I'm never going to go back and "clean up" that work. I'm not saying that I'll never return to interactive sheet music -- I think it's an awesome idea -- but if/when I were to return to it, I'd want to start from scratch, almost certainly use python, etc.

Still, that's no reason to hold my earlier work hostage. So I'm announcing the release of Firelily 0.3.

This is old code which I wrote during my second degree (B.Mus). It does not represent my current ability level, with regards to programming ability, project organization, compositional techniques, or anything else.

My research interests have shifted; I now consider this project abandoned.

I'm happy to make it available under the BSD license. I'm not certain that it would be of any use to anybody, but I've had one such request, so here you go! If you would prefer it under a different license (GPL, Apache, artistic, whatever), then just ask and I'll (almost certainly) license it to you under that other license. http://percival-music.ca/software/firelily-0.3.tar.gz

Jamie Bullock has expressed an interest in maintaining and improving Firelily, so if anybody stumbles across this blog post in a few months/years, go look there. :)