Music21

Releasing alpha 1 of v.5 of music21 quite early, because it includes an amazingly faster improved version of Chordify (thanks in large part to work by Josiah Wolf Oberholtzer)

**music21 v.5 is PYTHON 3 ONLY**

Do not upgrade to this version if you are using Python 2.7 (or better still, upgrade yourself to Python 3.6 instead). It runs on Python 3.4-3.6 only.

This is alpha code -- I am still formulating the changes for m21 version 5. Some things that have disappeared since v.4 may reappear, but some things that are currently here may be gone or significantly changed by v5 release. YMMV.

Other big changes:
* Python 3 only. Yes, I said that but I'm saying it again. This change has made developing much faster and a lot more fun. Also it's made music21 more powerful and faster.
* Chordify moves from O(n^2) to O(n) time -- Chordify on large scores works great now.
* MusicXML roundtrip now preserves much about appearance, style, metadata, etc. -- you can now load a musicxml file into music21 and back into your software and 90% of the time you'll get visually the same result as the original software. Finale roundtrip is especially good!
* Corpora searching is much better and much faster. Metadata is stored in pickle format.
* Feature Extraction runs multicore by default. Together with the average of 10x faster chordify, feature extraction on large datasets on multicore systems is now very strong.
* Many routines that used to return string filepaths now return pathlib.Path objects.
* Almost all deprecated functions are removed.
* Many keyword functions are now keyword only, so no worries about passing in "inPlace" accidentally.
* parsing of Volpiano (Gregorian chant notation) added.
* RehearsalMark is added (and in musicxml also).
* Empty spaces in MusicXML measures are converted to hidden rests, to avoid gapped streams.
* Pitches in chords on musicxml import are always sorted from lowest to highest.
* analysis.transposition -- searches pitch lists for number of distinct transpositions (thanks Mark Gotham)
* Copyright and other metadata is preserved in many formats on import. This is just being a good neighbor.
* Demos and most alpha code has been moved to a new separate repository: https://github.com/cuthbertLab/music21-demos -- they will be updated much less frequently. This will also make code development faster. Thanks to all who have contributed to music21's development. We'll be able to get more demos into the codebase by not needing to update them at every moment.

The remarkable work over less than a month has been largely aided by dropping the Python 2 code dependencies, so while upgrading to Python 3.6 might cause some grumbling, my ability to forge ahead quickly I hope will more than make up for it!

This is alpha code. It won't install by default on pip. Use

pip install --upgrade music21==5.0.3a1

Music21 v. 4 is released! 273 commits mean a lot of new features! See:

https://music21-mit.blogspot.com/2017/08/music21-v4-released-410.html

Download here or run

pip3 install --upgrade music21

to get the latest version

Lots of work towards the v4 release in the past 18 days, among the changes since 4.0.6:

documentation has been moved out of the music21 directory into the root directory -- it is no longer installed with music21 from pip -- this change was necessitated by the move to retina quality graphics, but reduces the installation size from 90MB to 15MB for the full corpus version and 6MB for the no-corpus version.

But docs are still extremely important as witnessed by the 3 new user's guide chapters and removal of some obsolete docs. And all docs pass a new nbval test. nbval is now required to build docs.

Chord.add (was append()) and Chord.remove() allow for direct manipulation of bugs.

Improvements to parallel processing in music21.

Ottava spanners now come in two types, transposing and non-transposing -- reflecting whether the pitches under the spanner already reflect the transposition (non-transposing) or not.

Many improvements to spanners and RomanNumerals.

.exe files are no longer generated -- they were rarely used and pip is a better choice for Windows users now.

v4.0.4 beta represents the first preview release of the new `music21` v. 4 system. As with all new "X" release names, v.4 has backward incompatible behaviors that I think are worth it for the great new features. The release is stable enough for general use and almost might be a release candidate.

among the 157 commits since v.3.1:

*Major new features:*

* Graphing rewrite!

.plot() and Graphing has always been one of the most powerful parts of `music21` since long before v.1.0 (mad props, Christopher Ariza!) but it's also been one of the most daunting aspects of using `music21`. It shouldn't be any more. The code has gone through a major rewrite to improve the simplicity of doing easy things and the power when doing difficult things. The easy things are documented in [Chapter 22](http://web.mit.edu/music21/doc/usersGuide/usersGuide_22_graphing.html) and the hard things in [Chapter 44](http://web.mit.edu/music21/doc/usersGuide/usersGuide_44_advancedGraphing.html).

* Style!

the all new style module and style.Style object handles aspects of a note or other object's visual display that are not (usually) semantic. This class has allowed a major increase in the ability to properly preserve MusicXML visual formatting on input and export.

Style objects are created only when needed, so el.hasStyleInformation() allows for checking for the presence of a .style object without creating one.

(To be documented more soon)

* Major rewrite of TinyNotation allows for easy extensibility.

Documented in the [User's Guide](http://web.mit.edu/music21/doc/usersGuide/usersGuide_16_tinyNotation.html)! Check it out!

* Always improving docs

The User's Guide goes up to chapter 24 now, with major new examples in [Chapter 20](http://web.mit.edu/music21/doc/usersGuide/usersGuide_20_examples2.html) along with rewritten chapters on keys, time signatures, sorting, and so on and so on. Plus all examples are now Retina quality for viewing fine details of scores.

*Other new features*
* much better metadata processing in musicxml, humdrum, and braille
* improved braille translation (tuplets) -- thanks Bo-Chen
* better beaming, meter, and tuplets in ABC
* output directly to PDF if MuseScore is installed.
* Nested Tuplets! including in MusicXML.
* Non-traditional key signatures
* New works by Clara Schumann in the corpus.
* stream.iterators.OffsetIterator() -- iterate groups of objects by offset.
* improvements to analysis.discrete
* demos/build_melody shows how to build MidiFile directly (thanks PeterMitrano!)
* corpus paths are now searchable in corpus.search()
* matplotlib and musescore graphics in Jupyter notebook are now retina quality.

Others, including bugs squashed:
* Warning on Python 2 that music21 v. 4 is the last version to support Py 2.
* ABC key signature and mode error fixed.
* AudioSearch bugs fixed (thanks jjrob13)
* Chord.normalOrderString (thanks emzhang)
* Removed lots of old crutches including the "analysisData" on Stream, Note.editorial, and others. Style fixes most of this.
* fix to Bach BWV 386 (thanks alexcoplan)
* Note.pitches returns a tuple not list, just like Chord.pitches
* Converter can deal with some wrong file extensions now.
* Instrument reprs are fixed
* configure finds many more notation programs.
* ties are imported better between elements in and out of voices in musicxml
* configure works on macOS when user directory contains spaces.
* Bugs in ending and restarting a recursiveIterator fixed.
* doc errors fixed (thanks Andrew Sanchez)

*Deprecations and deprecated elements removed*
* (this list does not contain changes to the alpha/ directory which can change at any time)
* Note.ps, and Note.accidental, Note.pitchClass, Note.pitchClassString, Note.diatonicNoteNum, and Note.microtone are all deprecated. Use Note.pitch.ps, etc. instead.
* Chord.normalForm is deprecated because it gave the wrong answer. use normalOrder instead; same with normalFormString
* SpannerBundle.list is deprecated; use list(SpannerBundle) instead
* with the advent of .style, el.color is deprecated, use el.style.color instead
* Stream.stream() is deprecated -- now that the transition to iterators is done, there should be no need for this.
* *REMOVED* stream.getOffsetByElement; use s.elementOffset(el) instead.
* *REMOVED* stream.haveBeamsBeenMade; use stream.streamStatus.haveBeamsBeenMade
* *REMOVED* stream.makeTupletBrackets(); use stream.makeNotation.makeTupletBrackets(s)
* *REMOVED* stream.realizeOrnaments; use stream.makeNotation.realizeOrnaments(s)
* nbconvert is no longer packaged with music21

Version 3 of `music21` is here! This is the first major release in 11 months, with nearly 600 commits since the last version. As a new major version, there are both huge new features as well as significant (often backwards incompatible) changes.

For complete details see:
http://music21-mit.blogspot.com/2016/08/music21-v-3-released-310.html

The beta/release-candidate for v3 of music21 -- a toolkit for computer-aided musicology, has been released! We are very close to a v3 final, with many great improvements.

For details, see:
https://music21-mit.blogspot.com/2016/08/music21-v-3-beta-306-released.html