MusicRaft

'MusicRaft' is an GUI for the ABC(plus) music notation, built around python and the Qt GUI toolkit. It is in fact a very lightweight (and very limited!) IDE implemented as 'the raft' on top of which the plugin 'abcraft' is created. (Actually, the architechtural split isn't quite so clean; the raft contains quite some ABC-specific code!)

A separate plugin pyraft supports editing of python3 source files. When a python script writes output with an HTML header, pyraft dsiplays the HTML in a special 'Html' tab within the display notebook. This is present in the 'git' project but absent in the python package, in order to keep the number of dependencies on other packages to a minimum.

##Installation

The 'official' way to install is musicraft is to use the python package repository. The exact syntax will vary across platforms but will be something like...

python3 -m pip install musicraft

after which starting musicraft is a simple matter of ...

python3 -m musicraft [abc source file name ...]

.. or something very similar.

It is possible to associate this action with all .abc files so that a double-click on such a file in the file manager is sufficient to start musicraft. How to do this depends on the operating systemcontext; perhaps this will be (semi)- automated in later releases of the musicraft package.

A few start-up scripts are also included. These are really a left-over from the time before I got the '-m' approach working but are left in as potentially useful. Where exactly these get installed - and whether that location is conveniently within the execution path - depends on your OS and system set-up.
###Environment

More 'on the go' debug information can be obtained by setting...

• MUSICRAFT_DBG = 1

... before starting musicraft. Inevitably, perhaps, the choice of what debug info to output is governed by my issues encountered recently not by your issues encountered today, so this is not guaranteed to be helpful!

Musicraft was originally designed to work with Qt4 via either PyQt4 or PySide. This software is however becoming more and more deprecated in favour of Qt5 via either PySide2 or PyQt5. Accordingly, Musicraft has been reworked to support these; indeed, musicraft PySide2 is now used by default. This behaviour can however be overruled by settinging an environment variabe:

• MUSICRAFT_QT = PyQt4
• MUSICRAFT_QT = PySide
• MUSICRAFT_QT = PyQt5

Not overruling this setting is treated as equivalent to...

• MUSICRAFT_QT = PySide2

Important note regarding 'Qt' dependencies:

The musicraft package specifies PySide2 as a dependency, so it gets installed whether you like it or not. This is only likely to be problem if you're running on a very old OS version that doesn't support PySide2, Qt5 etc. In this case, you may wish to pu t your own package together, baed on the code in this repository.

Recent OS versions (e.g. Ubuntu Linux 18.04, Windows 10) may only suport 'Qt5', not the older, deprecacted 'PyQt4'. In some cases, there is a workaround for this. For example, on Ubuntu 18.04 one can install PySide by:

sudo apt-get install python3-pyside

####Standalone binaries

I have created (using PyInstaller) standalone executables of Musicraft for 64-bit systems under Windows (tested on Windows 10) and under Linux (tested under Ububtu 18.04).