(the compiler is tiny, not the music)
Hello guys and girls. I sometimes like to make small audio projects, such as cutting and pasting audio, or even doing simple bootlegs. The existing tools to do this usual have one of the following problems:
- they're proprietary
- they're not automatable
- they're clunky
- they don't support nondestructive editing
Or a combination of the above.
TMC is meant to (humbly) solve that. It's a DSL (Domain-Specific Language) that describes a set of operations of audio files. It does not manipulate audio itself. Instead, it calls existing tools such as SoX, "the Swiss Army knife of sound processing programs". You can call that UNIX philosophy if that pleases you, but with systemd becoming mainstream I'm not sure what UNIX is :)
There are several advantages to this approach.
- Everything is nondestructive. That is, you can't lose work because all you write is a recipe for producing audio file. Source code.
- This source code is text. So you can diff it, check it into git, whatever. Ever tried to put an Audacity project in git? Yeah me neither, but it sounds bad.
- You can manipulate copyrighted stuff without distributing it. For example, I can publish "recipes" of bootlegs, without having to distribute the original songs. The sources are copyrighted, the result is too, but the recipe is not. Distributing a TMC file is like telling your DJ friend "loop the instru and drop the acapella at 16 bars". It's actually what the file contains, in a programmatic form.
- It's well-typed! BPMs and Durations don't have the same type (even though they both are Doubles), so you can't swap parameters.
Little documentation yet. See Music.TMC.Example for, well, an example.
API will break. And there's no license yet so you're not really supposed to use it anyway :)