Creating a Musescore Pipe Band Extension

• Jan 10, 2021 - 19:49

To;dr: how do I package and upload an extension so others can use musescore for pipe band files I've made?

I've nearly finished creating a set of files that will make musescore much more useful for people who write music for pipe bands.

Pipe bands have 4 main instruments, bagpipes, snare drums, tenor drums, and bass drums.

Drummers use the berger uniline staff, with left and right hands indicated by note placement below and above the line, respectively. I have solved this with a custom instrument and soundfont for each instrument.

Pipe Band Tenor drummers use either a bass clef staff with individual parts colour coded by pitch or a uniline staff. I modified the color notes plugin to used the colours I prefer. Visual flourishes by tenor drummers are shown using staff text currently and some day I might try to make a comprehensive custom pallet of flourish symbols (not yet though).

I improved playback for tenor and bass drums (I used tympani and concert bass prior to creating a instruments and soundfont from sampled drums).

Bagpipe notation in musescore had no issues, but playback of appogiaturas didn't match the specific way that bagpipers use ornamentation, so I made a plugin to correct the playback sound.

Finally, snare rolls were not playing back the way I liked, so I've approximated the correct tap and closed roll buzz sound using some modified MDL samples, and I'll add custom samples to my soundfont eventually.

I need to finish updating my templates and examples, and then I would like to figure out how to create an extension, ideally modeled after the MDL one, that can be installed the same way to save people the annoyance of having to read through my readme and drag my files to several different places on their computer.

Thanks in advance!


Comments

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Follow-up on this thread, here is what appear to be the steps for making an extension, although I still have to figure out how to make it "installable" (and do steps 6 and onward, project for this weekend).

It's possible that I am off base with a number of these steps but I'll come back to update as I go.

  1. create all the files you need for your extension and make sure they work (instrument definition, soundfont, any plugins, templates, workspaces you need, etc.)
  2. put everything in a folder called resources
  3. create a folder called whatever your extension will be called (e.g., mdl) and put the resources folder in that folder. I'll use myext as a placeholder for that folder name in this.
  4. create a folder called "build" in myext.
  5. download the following python script and save it in myext/build/(opt version)/: https://github.com/musescore/mdl/tree/master/build > package.py
  6. put this all in github at musescore/myext (your extension name)
  7. take a look at https://musescore.org/en/node/273636 (MDL "homepage") and make a version for your extension probably
  8. in theory that should be all
  9. you might also need a folder called guides, which MDL extension has, which is a folder with a bunch of mscz files for different instruments and has midi key maps and explains all the different notehead assignments and new symbols

In reply to by Kate.Dudek

I think you are right that you'd need to have it approved officially somehow, There is no process for this as far as I know because it's never come up :-). I'd start by checking out the Development info in the Contribute menu above, much of which isn't particularly relevant, but signing the CLA probably is, and joining the chat on Telegram definitely so.

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