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Technology report

Generating musical scores with LilyPond

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By Adam Cuerden and Kirill Lokshin

Thanks to a new MediaWiki extension, editors can now use the popular LilyPond format to embed musical scores in articles. The "Score" extension, created by Alexander Klauer (GrafZahl), renders musical scores in LilyPond score notation as PNG images, and can also transform those scores into audio and MIDI files automatically. An example of the extension's output, together with the corresponding LilyPond markup, is shown below:

\relative c'' { \time 4/4 \key c \major c4 g8 g a4 g r b^> c^> r \bar "|." } \addlyrics { Shave and a hair -- cut: two bits. }
<score midi="1">\relative c'' { \time 4/4 \key c \major 
c4 g8 g a4 g r b^> c^> r \bar "|." } 
\addlyrics { Shave and a hair -- cut: two bits. }</score>

More details on the options provided by the extension can be found on its help page and MediaWiki description page. The LilyPond project also offers a variety of useful documentation, including an FAQ that explains how to use a keyboard or one of several score-based editors to create LilyPond markup that can be imported into Wikipedia articles.

In brief

  • VisualEditor continues to improve: Several new features have been added to VisualEditor, including automatic display of both "edit source" and "edit beta" links on sections, the ability to edit reference content directly from a list of footnotes, and support for Opera browsers. Soon to be supported are strikethrough and <code> markup, with mathematical markup to follow.
  • Support for new fonts: Several new fonts have recently been added to the default set available on Wikimedia projects; these include Gentium, a font meant to support Latin-script languages which use multiple diacritics; Shapour, which supports the Pahlavi script; and Old Persian, which supports, unsurprisingly, Old Persian. The fonts are not yet available on the English Wikipedia, and no date for their release has been given.
  • Innovative uses for Wikidata: Gerard Meijssen has written a series of blog posts highlighting innovative uses of Wikidata. The selected projects include automatically creating family trees, automatically filling out infoboxes, using Wikidata to identify people in pictures and even automatically-generated multilingual factsheets.
  • Tech news: As always, tech-related posts are also located on Meta.
  • PNG thumbnailing improved: The thumbnailing of PNG files larger than 35 megapixels has been improved, helping to address an issue where uploading a lossless copy of a large image would result in a failure to create a thumbnail, giving the unfortunate impression that the file was corrupted.
  • MIME search tool enabled: The MIME search tool (Special:MIMESearch), which allows users to generate lists of files according to their MIME type, has been enabled on all Wikimedia projects following a series of performance improvements.
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Re Special:Mimesearch - Its not really meant for normal users. Its also not very useful in general (Getting a list of all jpg files is pretty useless when there are millions of them). Anything in particular you want me to document about it (and any particular place you'd expect to find documentation about it)? It pretty much does what it's name is. If you happen to know the MIME type for a file, you can get a list of all files of that type. For example, we recently started to allow wav files on commons - commons:Special:MIMESearch/audio/wav gets a list of them. I should note, special:mimesearch is not a new feature, it was just rewritten to have better performance. Previously it was just turned off on wikimedia wikis. Additionally it doesn't support wildcards at the moment, so you can't just get all "audio" files, you have to look at each type individually. Bawolff (talk) 23:00, 19 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
It could use a list of the filetypes that can be searched for, or at least the types, e.g. image/, audio/, etc. I realise it's not the most useful search tool. Adam Cuerden (talk) 23:11, 19 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
In theory you could search for any mime type (there are literally thousands). In practise there are very few actually in use on commons - commons:Commons:MIME_type_statistics. Bawolff (talk) 00:08, 21 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
This is a new feature, and, frankly, the documentation is still abyssmal. I believe most of the documentation presumed the user would be typing in the LilyPond by hand. This is never going to happen except for the shortest scores. Adam Cuerden (talk) 14:57, 26 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
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