Remove abjad.play()

[trevorbaca]

Modern version of OS X no longer play MIDI files. That is, modern versions of neither iTunes nor QuickTime Player support MIDI playback. This probably reflects Apple's decision to move away from MIDI altogether. However, MIDI playback will always be important for a portion of our user base.

What's the recommended solution for MIDI playback on Modern Macs? Through a GUI it's probably Garage Band. And Timidity is a good option from the Terminal. Homebrew makes Timidity installation easy:

brew install timidity

Commandline MIDI playback is then as easy as timidity test.midi.

All of this works fine. But there appears to be a problem on our side because play(note) seems always to open QuickTime Player. Even when ~/.abjad/abjad.cfg contains a setting like midi = /usr/local/bin/timidity.

So the purpose of this ticket is to debug ~/.abjad/abjad.cfg MIDI settings and make sure that play() continues to work.

[trevorbaca]

Still valid in June 2017.

[trevorbaca]

Leaving open in January 2019.

[trevorbaca]

My preferred way of going forward is to remove abjad.play(). Users who want MIDI output can easily build an abjad.LilyPondFile object with an abjad.Block("midi") inserted in the location LilyPond requires.

[jgarte]

My preferred way of going forward is to remove abjad.play(). Users who want MIDI output can easily build an abjad.LilyPondFile object with an abjad.Block("midi") inserted in the location LilyPond requires.

Anything that reduces the lines of code sounds good to me :)

I also wouldn't mind using abjad.Block("midi") instead of abjad.play(). That sounds like an elegant solution.