Android app based on MuseScore

[Thomas Stockx]

Greetings,

I'm Thomas Stockx, a CS student at University Hasselt (Belgium). The time has come for me to write a Bachelor's Thesis.
A Professor of mine stood in contact with Thomas Bonte about providing a topic for my thesis. One of the possible topics would be an Android app based on MuseScore. It's purpose wouldn't be creating a standard Score Player, but to provide some different functionality of some sorts.
Examples given by Thomas Bonte would be:
- A mobile app shows sheet music and listens to incoming microphone input. It gives feedback to the user if he/she's playing the correct notes. As long as the user does not play the correct note, the app won't continue.
- A mobile app which is connected to a keyboard via MIDI and automates navigation through the sheet music based on input. (No more manually changing pages)
- A mobile app which parses MusicXML and provides a visualisation of an instrument so the user can see how he/she should play it. (Example: displaying a flute and which holes in the body to close)
- A mobile app which records audio of the student and provides an interface for the teacher so he can track the progress of the student online.

Now I have noticed that the current mobile code is still very beta. Because of this, I was wondering if a mobile app like mentioned above is doable with the current mobile library.
I have some experience in developing for Android, but only via native code (Java).
Seeing how expansive the current mobile library is, it would probably be best to also develop in Qt/C++.

How usable is the current library for one of the examples give above?
Also, are these doable as a Bachelor's Thesis (no infinite time :p)?
If not, do you maybe have another proposition for a Bachelor's Thesis involving MuseScore?

Thanks in advance for your reply,

Thomas Stockx

[lasconic]

Hi Thomas,
Thank you for reaching us!

The separation between MuseScore UI and rendering library has gone a
long way in the past year. The library "libmscore" is not yet 100%
polished, and usable out of the box but with some guidance, it's
perfectly usable. An alpha prototype is running on my phone. Just to
make it clear, the job of this library is to display and manipulate a
score.

As you highlighted, you don't have infinite time, so I wouldn't go the
score follower way, being audio or MIDI, because it's a huge work by
itself. The other two should be doable. In particular, focusing on a
given instrument can make it easier. Recording audio seems to be
possible with the NDK in ICS. The one with the instrument would be
more a graphic project.

Currently, the alpha prototype of the Android app we have is
developped with QML, Qt, and C++ and it's not possible to use Java to
develop against libmscore in the current state AFAIK. It could be a
part of your thesis as well to make it happen or to explain why it
doesn't work.

Hope it helps,

Lasconic

2012/1/4 Thomas Stockx <[hidden email]>:

> Greetings,
>
> I'm Thomas Stockx, a CS student at University Hasselt (Belgium). The time
> has come for me to write a Bachelor's Thesis.
> A Professor of mine stood in contact with Thomas Bonte about providing a
> topic for my thesis. One of the possible topics would be an Android app
> based on MuseScore. It's purpose wouldn't be creating a standard Score
> Player, but to provide some different functionality of some sorts.
> Examples given by Thomas Bonte would be:
> - A mobile app shows sheet music and listens to incoming microphone input.
> It gives feedback to the user if he/she's playing the correct notes. As long
> as the user does not play the correct note, the app won't continue.
> - A mobile app which is connected to a keyboard via MIDI and automates
> navigation through the sheet music based on input. (No more manually
> changing pages)
> - A mobile app which parses MusicXML and provides a visualisation of an
> instrument so the user can see how he/she should play it. (Example:
> displaying a flute and which holes in the body to close)
> - A mobile app which records audio of the student and provides an interface
> for the teacher so he can track the progress of the student online.
>
> Now I have noticed that the current mobile code is still very beta. Because
> of this, I was wondering if a mobile app like mentioned above is doable with
> the current mobile library.
> I have some experience in developing for Android, but only via native code
> (Java).
> Seeing how expansive the current mobile library is, it would probably be
> best to also develop in Qt/C++.
>
> How usable is the current library for one of the examples give above?
> Also, are these doable as a Bachelor's Thesis (no infinite time :p)?
> If not, do you maybe have another proposition for a Bachelor's Thesis
> involving MuseScore?
>
> Thanks in advance for your reply,
>
> Thomas Stockx
>
> --
> View this message in context: http://musescore-developer.685061.n2.nabble.com/Android-app-based-on-MuseScore-tp7151556p7151556.html
> Sent from the MuseScore Developer mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
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[Thomas Stockx]

Hi lasconic, thanks for the quick reply!

I've done some looking around and I found that there's work being done on porting the Qt Mobility API so it's usable with Necessitas (which is what I guess you are using for Qt on Android), so maybe that's another possibility instead of using the NDK.
Currently I'm not really able to go in much details or start trying things out already, due to having exams at the moment and the fact that it's not 100% certain that I get this topic myself (might go to another interested student). However I must admit I'm really eager to start trying some things out, especially because Qt on Android is new for me, as is using the NDK to go a bit more low-level.

Begin february I'll probably get to hear the news if I can start on this, so I'll keep you posted.

Again, thanks for your reply.

Thomas

[pjv]

It seems Thomas S. is doing well at the moment :-)

If there are still developers I haven't met, let me introduce my work. At MusicHackDay SF 2011 I started to work on an Android app prototype with Musescore in the back of my mind. Differently than the Android app the Musescore developers are working on (mostly directed towards showing the notes), I basically made a third party app for collecting sheet music from Musescore. Since then I have been off-and-on perfecting this app. At the hackathon I made an XStream based XML client for the Musescore.com API, which I recently discarded when I shifted everything to JSON for better performance. You now can find this advanced but limited JSON API client on the Musescore-com github. Making it available there undoubtedly helped Thomas to clear the second milestone for his thesis project.

My Sheet Music Extension for Collectionista focuses more on keeping a collection of your scores, instead of the music notation side of things. It allows searching and adding scores from musescore.com. Collectionista is an open source app in the Market (also by me), that can be considered a general collection manager framework. I just launched a crowdfunding campaign yesterday that would let me finish the sheet music app and bring it to the market: http://bit.ly/smecol. If you could take a look and see if you can invest €1 or more, I would appreciate it. Hurry, it'll be over in 30 days. I'll be selecting beta testers out of these funders too.