Music scores and playlists

Scores as MusicXML musicxml mxl (and an xml that is one), MuseScore mscx mscz, ABC abc and Guitar Pro gp3 gp4 gp5 gpx gp; playlists as m3u m3u8 pls xspf, and cue sheets cue

Scores

A score opens as its music: the pages drawn as staves and notes, and a player above them that plays it through the app's own synthesizer, the same one that plays a MIDI file. The line on top names it — MusicXML (compressed) · 4 parts · 10 measures · 0:23, with the title and the composer first when the file has them.

Format	Files	Read
MusicXML	musicxml, xml, compressed as mxl	the exchange format of notation programs
MuseScore	mscx, compressed as mscz	MuseScore 2 to 4
ABC	abc	the folk tunes' text notation
Guitar Pro	gp3 gp4 gp5, gpx, gp	Guitar Pro 3 to 8

Which one a file is, its bytes decide: a Guitar Pro 6 .gpx is told from a GPS track, and a Guitar Pro 7 .gp from a protein sequence.

The table mode holds every note, a row each, a chord's notes on rows of their own: the part, staff, voice, measure, beat, its start and duration in quarter notes and in seconds, its pitch (C#4) and MIDI key, a guitar's string and fret, and whether it is tied, a grace note, or sung to a lyric:

SELECT pitch, count(*) FROM 'song.gp5' GROUP BY pitch ORDER BY 2 DESC

The score is drawn as standard notation only: a guitar part is written on the staff, not as tablature. Repeats are played once, and dynamics, articulations and a guitar's bends and slides are left out. A browser plays no MIDI, so there the player says so: the desktop app plays the score.

Playlists and cue sheets

m3u m3u8 pls xspf cue

A playlist opens as the table of its entries — number, title, artist, album, start, duration and location — and a list of the files it names that are there beside it, each opening as itself. A stream's address, or a file that is not there, stays a row of the table.

A cue sheet gives each track its start in the one file it cuts up. An HLS playlist (.m3u8, the playlist a video site streams in pieces) lists its segments, each starting where the last ended.

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