Mascii 2.0

This is source code for the Musical Ascii ("Mascii") polyphonic text-based music notation system.

Using Mascii

To learn more about how to use Mascii, including its syntax and how to install it, see the Mascii quickstart

Once notated in Mascii, a piece can then easily be converted to a variety of formats including standard printed sheet music, playable sound files, and many other widely used formats.

Some musical examples notated in Mascii can be found at mascii.org

Mascii is well suited for sharing musical snippets on forums and webpages or wikis.

Developing Mascii

Building the Mascii jar

(For developers) Pre-built binaries of Mascii are available here, but if you'd like to build the Mascii engine from scratch, do this:

1. ensure you have Java 1.8+ and Maven installed
2. cd scripts
3. ./build.sh

This generates a jar in the mascii2/target directory. To learn how to use this jar to create music, see Mascii quickstart.

To regenerate the Mascii grammar

Mascii relies on the Antlr 4 lex/parse system, which uses grammar files to express the core syntax of Mascii. The antlr source grammar files are in the antr/ directory, called MasciiLexer.g4 and MasciiParser.g4.

Antlr translates the grammer from these files into an equivalent set of java files, which we then copy into the mascii2/src/main/java/com/kastkode/mascii2/antlrgenerated/ folder of this project. To regenerate the corresponding Java classes from those grammar files, do this:

1. make sure you have Anltr 4 installed in your system
2. cd antlr/scripts
3. ./compile.sh
4. ./export.sh

The export step is what copies the antlr-generated java classes back into the main project. You'll of course need to rebuild the project for any changes to take effect.