play-notes

A simple utility for playing music with the PC speaker. Makes use of a simple custom file format for encoding sound with notes.

Usage

Invoke with:

python3 play-notes.py [-v|--verbose] [-d|--dry-run] track.notes

Verbose prints the constructed command, and a log of the calculated half-tone distances from C0. Dry run implies verbose, and does not execute the constructed command.

Sound format

Header contains global info for the playback:

• BPM
• global_notelength - defines how much of a beat each note will take up, can be overriden per note (example: 0.5)

Note formatting:

note [length] [delay]

Notes are expressed as /[A-G][#b]?\d/ (ex: C0, C#6, Bb5).

After every note, the rest of the remaining beat will be waited through with a delay, unless one is explicitly specified. This means that a note with the length 1.75 will have a delay of 0.25 by default.

Repeated sections are marked with directives:

• start_section
• repeat_section N - ends current section and appends it N times

Empty lines are skipped, comments are lines that start with #.

Formatted as follows:

BPM
global_notelength

# One note per line
A#4

# Optionally, override length
# This one will take up two beats
A#4 2

# Optionally, override both delay and length
# This note would normally play for half a beat and then be delayed for another half, instead the delay will be 1.5 times the beat length.
A4 0.5 1.5


# You can also repeat groups of notes!

start_section

A1
A2
A3

start_section

A4
A5

repeat_section 2

repeat_section 3

The extension .notes is preferred.

Dependencies

This script relies on:

• an implementation of beep in your $PATH