# &App; User Guide

## Introduction to &bmn;

&bmn; is an internationally accepted standard for expressing musical ideas in tactile readable form.

Since &App; is mostly useless to a user who does not know &bmn;, the first part of this book is dedicated to teaching the very basics of &bmn;. If you are already familiar with the international &bmn; standard, you can saves skip over this section.

### Simple monophonic melodies

#### Notes and rests

In &bmn; pitch and duration of a musical event are encoded into a single character.

#### Note and rest symbols

Note value | C | D | E | F | G | A | B
whole | &brl13456; | &brl1356; | &brl12346; | &brl123456; | &brl12356; | &brl2346; | &brl23456;
half | &brl1345; | &brl135; | &brl1234; | &brl12345; | &brl1235; | &brl234; | &brl2345;
quarter | &brl1456; | &brl156; | &brl1246; | &brl12456; | &brl1256; | &brl246; | &brl2456;
eight | &brl145; | &brl15; | &brl124; | &brl1245; | &brl125; | &brl24; | &brl245;

## Obtaining MusicXML scores

&App; is not a full &omr; solution. To be able to read sheet music, you will first need to obtain the music you want to read with &App; in MusicXML format.

The following chapters are concerned with how and where you can obtain sheet music in MusicXML.

### What is MusicXML?

MusicXML is a &XML; based file format for storing musical notation. It is being developed by Recordare LLC.

### MusicXML on the Internet

Since MusicXML is increasingly being used as a interchange format between different music notation software, it is increasingly being used as the canonical format to distribute musical notation over the Internet.

Therefore, there is a fairly good chance that the music you are looking for is already available on the Internet in MusicXML format.

## Using &App;

Now that we have acquainted ourselves with &bmn; we can go on and examine in detail how &App; can be used to automatically transcribe scanned sheet music to &bmn;.

### The Menubar

This list briefly describes the actions available in the &App; menu.

Ctrl o File Open

- Open a MusicXML document.

## Frequently Asked Questions

## General Information

Does &App; work on
Windows?

Yes. You will need to install Python, setuptools and pygame and their associated dependencies. An installer for &App; on Windows is currently not available, but could be built. Volunteers for maintaining a Windows version of &App; are very welcome!

Why can't I read the default output of &App; on
Linux with
BRLTTY?

&App; uses Unicode by default to output braille and text such that sighted and blind users can read the output without major confusion.

However, the Unicode braille row is only supported by the braille display driver BRLTTY on Linux since release 3.10. You will also need the braille fonts provided on .

## Traditional UNIX manual pages

&app;

1 0.2

&app;

convert MusicXML to &bmn;

    	  &app;
    	  --gui

    	    -p
    	    --play

    	    -w COLUMNS
    	    --width COLUMNS

    	  MusicXML file

#### Description

&App; converts MusicXML files to &bmn;.

#### Options

&App; always expects a MusicXML input file on the command line.

`--gui`

- Start up the GNOME user interface.

`-p`

`--play`

- Play music in addition to converting it to braille.

`-w`

`--width`

- Set the desired amount of braille cells used horizontally.

  The default is 32.