ksr
Joined 10 years ago
Joined 10 years ago
- Following the trail of session musicians involved in albums that I like. For example, I've had great pleasure discovering Justin Adams' albums from his work with Robert Plant.
- Following the trail of record producers
- Browsing through albums of a given label that puts out albums I like
- Browsing by geographical area / time period. I love the Radiooooo UI https://app.radiooooo.com/
- Getting specific recommendations / playlists from friends or web people I trust
As an avid listener, I've been assiduously building a digital music library since the year 2000. I started buying physical CDs, mostly used and in bulk, only to find that they are an impossibly huge burden when moving countries, which I did twice in the intervening years. I slowly moved to digital by ripping everything I could lay my hands on to FLAC, doing my best to scan all the booklets into PDF along the way. I believe I'm mostly done with my local public library's CD stock - at least for the music that interests me. I dig deep in so-called world music and large collections like magazine compilations. I usually collect whole series and I have a soft spot for cover versions of important composers.
To host all this (around 10TB today), I am running a Synology server and I'm backing up the whole thing to Backblaze. Synology has helpful apps for all platforms that allow connecting and listening to the music. I am using an old tablet as music player, connected to portable speakers around the house. It works great!
It's been my pleasure to share music discoveries with my friends and family. What's missing is a very good way to navigate this massive library in the many dimensions of the music universe.
Are there music players that allow searching by credit? E.g. albums produced by Rick Rubin, or tracks where Justin Adams plays guitar. This kind of information is usually available on Discogs or MusicBrainz.
Right now, I use node-isbn https://www.npmjs.com/package/node-isbn which mostly works well but is getting old in the tooth.
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: Web Audio, Web MIDI, MusicXML, C++, Emscripten, TypeScript and the full Web stack
Résumé/CV: https://blog.karimratib.me/assets/CV-KarimRATIB.pdf
Email: [email protected]
I want to be hired to build Web-based music applications. I have very good experience in this domain, currently working on extending the open source music engraving engine Verovio with support for microtonality and better MusicXML import.
See my work at https://blog.karimratib.me/
It's not a from-scratch effort, quite the contrary: I'm trying to tie in existing music standards (MIDI, MusicXML, SMuFL, MEI, etc.) and ensure that FOSS systems (MuseScore, Verovio, smaller components) implement enough of those standards to support music-i18n.
Sometimes, this also includes extending the standards themselves when they are not fully capable of representing some non-mainstream musical aspect. For example, MusicXML lacks the ability of representing multiple accidentals per note (whereas MEI does), which is a must for microtonality.
I started down this path around 2018, as a music player who got interested in arranging Arabic songs in a "Real Book" style. It opened a giant rabbit hole that I'm still far from having fully explored.
Now and then, I collaborate with other devs who are interested in adjacent topics. I would love to hear from some of you here!
As an entry point, I recommend checking out the "progress report" I wrote last October: https://blog.karimratib.me/2024/10/01/music-grimoire-progres... - I'm currently drafting this year's update. My main demo is at https://blog.karimratib.me/demos/musicxml/
2. sub-scales = what you call interval sequence.
If you don't mind, we can continue this conversation by email. Mine is in my profile on HN.
1. In my own similar library (https://github.com/infojunkie/scalextric) I decided to pragmatically throw an exception if the transpose method is called on an untransposable scale... At the moment I'm not trying very hard to handle all the cases of transposability - I'm sure there's a mathematical object like a group or ring to describe such cases.
2. I'll read your code to understand better how you handle sub-scale sequences. I would like to revisit my own approach to start at the dyads (sequence of 2 tones plucked from a given tuning) and build up longer sequences from those. I think this would allow to distinguish between ascending and descending sequences in a natural way.
3. I've spent quite a bit of time with MusicXML, and some time with MEI as well.. Yes, neither format has a model for arbitrary tunings which is a glaring gap. MusicXML does represent the full set of visual accidentals (including custom SMuFL glyphs) as well as per-note decimal pitch alterations that can accommodate any cent value. MEI also represents a reasonably complete set of accidentals although it's a closed set, as opposed to MusicXML's open set of accidentals. MEI supports a few pre-defined tunings which also falls short of generality. In addition, MEI does not support per-note pitch alterations, which makes it even harder to represent anything outside the tunings that it pre-defines.
There's unfortunately little activity to update these formats to include general tunings. I'm having discussions in both communities, maybe you'd like to add your voice: https://github.com/music-encoding/music-encoding/issues/1167, https://github.com/w3c/musicxml/discussions/586.
4. I've also spent quite a bit of time on MIDI microtonality... There are 3 main approaches that I'm aware of:
a. MIDI Tuning System which maps the 128 MIDI notes to arbitrary frequencies.
b. Pitch bending which has the limitation that you mentioned above. MPE is essentially an organized methodology for reusing empty MIDI channels in a round-robin fashion for pitch bends and other controller effects.
c. MIDI 2 supports per-note controller settings out of the box, thereby superseding MPE.
My current focus is to create a MusicXML => MIDI conversion pipeline that supports arbitrary tunings, using Verovio as the MIDI conversion engine. I am of course "inventing" new MusicXML elements to represent these tunings and their mappings (and MEI elements too, because Verovio represents its own internal state based on MEI). My aim is to produce a MIDI version of the canonical Sagittal Example (https://www.sagittal.org/exmp/index.htm) from a MusicXML file.
I am especially interested to hear your plans / thoughts about the following:
- Supporting non-ET tunings
- Supporting tetrachords and other scale building blocks (like Arabic ajnas)
- Importing/exporting MusicXML
- Exporting to MIDI
Thanks!