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                                               ~ alda ~

Installation | Docs | Changelog | Contributing

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New to Alda? You may be interested in reading this blog post as an introduction.

Inspired by other music/audio programming languages such as PPMCK, LilyPond and ChucK, Alda aims to be a powerful and flexible programming language for the musician who wants to easily compose and generate music on the fly, using naught but a text editor. Alda is designed in a way that equally favors aesthetics, flexibility and ease of use, with (eventual) support for the text-based creation of all manner of music: classical, popular, chiptune, electroacoustic, and more!

• Easy to understand, markup-like syntax
• Perfect for musicians who don't know how to program and programmers who don't know how to music
• Represent scores as text files and play them back with the alda command-line tool
• Interactive REPL lets you type Alda code and hear the results in real time
• Underlying Clojure DSL allows you to use Alda directly in your Clojure project.
• Inline Clojure code allows you to hack the Gibson and write scores programmatically
• Create MIDI music using any of the instruments in the General MIDI Sound Set

• Define and use waveform synthesis instruments
• Import MIDI files
• Export to MusicXML for inter-operability with other music software
• A more robust REPL, tailor-made for editing scores interactively
• A plugin system allowing users to define custom/unofficial syntax in Alda scores

If you're a developer and you'd like to help, come on in -- the water's fine!

piano: o3
g8 a b > c d e f+ g | a b > c d e f+ g4
g8 f+ e d c < b a g | f+ e d c < b a g4
<< g1/>g/>g/b/>d/g

For more examples, see these example scores.

You must have Java 7+ installed on your system in order to run Alda.

(Chances are, you already have a recent enough version of Java installed.)

• Go to the latest release page and download alda.

• Make the file executable:

    chmod +x alda
  

• Make alda available on your $PATH:

  Using /usr/local/bin here as an example; you can use any directory on your $PATH.

    mv alda /usr/local/bin
  

• Go to the latest release page and download alda.exe.

• Make the alda command available by moving alda.exe to your system root path:

    C:\> move alda.exe %SystemRoot%
  

Default JVM soundfonts usually are of low quality. We recommend installing a good freeware soundfont like FluidR3 to make your MIDI instruments sound a lot nicer. For your convenience, there is a script in this repo that will install the FluidR3 soundfont for Mac and Linux users.

If you're a Windows user and you know how to install a MIDI soundfont to the Java Virtual Machine, please let us know!

To install FluidR3 on your Mac or Linux system, clone this repo and run:

scripts/install-fluidr3

This will download FluidR3 and replace ~/.gervill/soundbank-emg.sf2 (your JVM's default soundfont) with it.

For the best experience when editing Alda score files, install the Alda file-type plugin for your editor of choice.

Don't see a plugin for your favorite editor? Write your own and open a Pull Request to add it here! :)

• Sublime Text
• Atom
• Vim

We're still working on improving the Alda update process. Ideally you'll be able to just type alda update to get the latest version.

For now, you can update Alda by downloading the latest release and repeating the install process.

To play a file:

alda play --file examples/bach_cello_suite_no_1.alda

To play arbitrary code:

alda play --code "piano: c6 d12 e6 g12~4"

To start an Alda REPL:

alda repl

Alda's documentation can be found here.

PRs welcome! See: CONTRIBUTING.md

👏 👏 👏 A big shout-out to our contributors! 👏 👏 👏

Sign up to the universe of Clojure chat @ http://clojurians.net/, then join us on #alda

Copyright © 2012-2016 Dave Yarwood et al

Distributed under the Eclipse Public License version 1.0.