music21 is a Toolkit for Computational Musicology
Releasing alpha 1 of v.5 of music21 quite early, because it includes an amazingly faster improved version of Chordify (thanks in large part to work by Josiah Wolf Oberholtzer)
music21 v.5 is PYTHON 3 ONLY
Do not upgrade to this version if you are using Python 2.7 (or better still, upgrade yourself to Python 3.6 instead). It runs on Python 3.4-3.6 only.
This is alpha code -- I am still formulating the changes for m21 version 5. Some things that have disappeared since v.4 may reappear, but some things that are currently here may be gone or significantly changed by v5 release. YMMV.
Other big changes:
The remarkable work over less than a month has been largely aided by dropping the Python 2 code dependencies, so while upgrading to Python 3.6 might cause some grumbling, my ability to forge ahead quickly I hope will more than make up for it!
This is alpha code. It won't install by default on pip. Use
pip install --upgrade music21==5.0.3a1
Music21 v. 4 is released! 273 commits mean a lot of new features! See:
https://music21-mit.blogspot.com/2017/08/music21-v4-released-410.html
Download here or run
pip3 install --upgrade music21
to get the latest version
Lots of work towards the v4 release in the past 18 days, among the changes since 4.0.6:
documentation has been moved out of the music21 directory into the root directory -- it is no longer installed with music21 from pip -- this change was necessitated by the move to retina quality graphics, but reduces the installation size from 90MB to 15MB for the full corpus version and 6MB for the no-corpus version.
But docs are still extremely important as witnessed by the 3 new user's guide chapters and removal of some obsolete docs. And all docs pass a new nbval test. nbval is now required to build docs.
Chord.add (was append()) and Chord.remove() allow for direct manipulation of bugs.
Improvements to parallel processing in music21.
Ottava spanners now come in two types, transposing and non-transposing -- reflecting whether the pitches under the spanner already reflect the transposition (non-transposing) or not.
Many improvements to spanners and RomanNumerals.
.exe files are no longer generated -- they were rarely used and pip is a better choice for Windows users now.
v4.0.4 beta represents the first preview release of the new music21 v. 4 system. As with all new "X" release names, v.4 has backward incompatible behaviors that I think are worth it for the great new features. The release is stable enough for general use and almost might be a release candidate.
among the 157 commits since v.3.1:
Major new features:
.plot() and Graphing has always been one of the most powerful parts of music21 since long before v.1.0 (mad props, Christopher Ariza!) but it's also been one of the most daunting aspects of using music21. It shouldn't be any more. The code has gone through a major rewrite to improve the simplicity of doing easy things and the power when doing difficult things. The easy things are documented in Chapter 22 and the hard things in Chapter 44.
the all new style module and style.Style object handles aspects of a note or other object's visual display that are not (usually) semantic. This class has allowed a major increase in the ability to properly preserve MusicXML visual formatting on input and export.
Style objects are created only when needed, so el.hasStyleInformation() allows for checking for the presence of a .style object without creating one.
(To be documented more soon)
Documented in the User's Guide! Check it out!
The User's Guide goes up to chapter 24 now, with major new examples in Chapter 20 along with rewritten chapters on keys, time signatures, sorting, and so on and so on. Plus all examples are now Retina quality for viewing fine details of scores.
Other new features
Others, including bugs squashed:
Deprecations and deprecated elements removed
Version 3 of music21 is here! This is the first major release in 11 months, with nearly 600 commits since the last version. As a new major version, there are both huge new features as well as significant (often backwards incompatible) changes.
For complete details see: http://music21-mit.blogspot.com/2016/08/music21-v-3-released-310.html
The beta/release-candidate for v3 of music21 -- a toolkit for computer-aided musicology, has been released! We are very close to a v3 final, with many great improvements.
For details, see: https://music21-mit.blogspot.com/2016/08/music21-v-3-beta-306-released.html
The first release of the music21 v.3 system. Major changes include the creation of "StreamIterator" classes that greatly reduce the number of Streams created. Full release notes are available on the music21 list. Not backwards compatible.
This maintenance release of music21 fixes several errors in MusicXML input and output and marks some functions or properties (such as Music21Object.isGrace) as deprecated for 3.0. It mainly fixes under-the-hood errors. It also adds compatibility with matplotlib 1.5.
Major changes are going in the music21 3.0 track.
Fixes some small errors throughout that were uncaught in v.2.1.0 release due to one of the errors breaking the test system, and one larger error in stream.replace() which is main reason for the quick update.
Adds some features that were originally slated for 2.3, but which were ready and thus are easier to add now than to back out and put out later, including:
if len(stream.getX()) > 0: with if stream.iter.getX() which will return True as soon as the first item is found..elements -- there's almost no need to do so; will work on potentially deprecating it soon.The long-awaited (at least by me) version 2 of music21 is released! This is the first version of the v.2 release to be out of beta and stable enough for general use by everyone.
The first non-beta release of music21 since v. 1.9.3 (June 2014) gives a ton of new features and lots of new speed. But being a major release change number, it also has some changes that every programmer using the system needs to be aware of. The release notes on GitHub gives all the details, but here are the highlights since 1.9:
.iter property and the recurse() method. These are big changes for speed and reliability.alpha sub package. demos reorganized.In case anyone is keeping track, since v.1.0 (June 2012), here are the:
music21j
Oh, and I did more than patch bugs in the last week:
Streams use .iter and .recurse() in TONS of functions, making many a lot faster, a few a bit slower, but all cleaner to debug and safer.
Deprecated items now return a deprecation warning.
Duration objects now have a .client which can inform the Note of changes to it.
.classes searches are way faster. Returns tuple.
deepcopy is about 30% faster.
common is split into a directory of related functions. Now worth looking through.
all corpus files, including small .abc files with non-standard additions, now parse. A complete corpus.search().parse() should be possible without any try: statements.
several bugs in musicxml processing (mainly related to the handling of expressions, noteheads, etc., on chords) have been fixed. Also Finale's <transpose> tag is supported.
code is much more "lint-free" catching many subtle bugs.
audioSearch is cleaned up, with beta-type code moved to demos.
Documentation much improved including three new User's Guide sections, and (thanks to bagratte) fixes for UTF-8 errors.
io.open replaces codecs.open for better non-Western script handling.
.egg files are no longer distributed. I'll work on getting .whl (wheel) files soon, but for now use .tar.gz. PyPi no longer supports .egg, so there's no reason for them.
incompatible changes
.fullyQualifiedClasses is GONE. No one used it. Instead a new .classSet replaces it for rapid class searching.
sites.Sites and sites.SiteRef are no longer imported into base by default.
documentation modules reorganized, with better examples.
stream.core moves several core modules out of the stream module.
Volume.parent renamed Volume.client to match Derivation and Duration
.components on Duration now returns a tuple.
Today also announces the first commit of music21 3.0 -- for the first time, I'm going to try to do something daring: keep bug fixes and some backwards compatible changes in the 2.1 (2.2, etc.) branch, but go forward with bigger changes in a 3.0-alpha branch. Some things that you might expect to happen:
.getElementsByClass(), getElementsByOffset() -- the fact that so many streams get created is one of the biggest headaches and reasons why the system gets slow. You can prepare for the change by examining your usage of these functions and asking yourself, "Am I actually using this as a Stream? Or just as a bunch of objects to iterate over in a for loop or to count using len()"? If the latter, you're fine. If the former, go ahead and add .stream() after it, for instance filteredStream = s.getElementsByClass("TimeSignature").stream(). The last .stream() call does NOTHING right now, but it will ensure that your code works exactly the same after the change happens. If you want to use the new features (even in 2.1) add .iter between s and .getElementsByClass() (but leave off the .stream(). You'll find that life will be going a lot lot lot faster.Thanks everyone for great support! -- Myke