Brockmaestro needs developers!
Brockmaestro is a new project to develop an easy-to-use music notation program, designed for creating printed music. It needs more developers, and is in its very early stages, as you can see from this screenshot.
To contribute to the project, ideally you will need these skills:
At the moment it is written in Linux, using the gtkmm libraries for the user interface. Ports to other operating systems will be considered later.
If you are interested in contributing, email me: robert dot brockway at virgin dot net. The development source code will be available through CVS soon - check here for updates.
- Rob Brockway
Project Administrator
Getting the Source Code
Installing libraries
You will also need the right libraries installed to compile and run Brockmaestro. GTK+ is needed, but if you are using the GNOME desktop then it will already be installed. It also needs gtkmm (version 2.4.0 or later), the C++ bindings for GTK+. This usually needs to be installed by hand, and itself requires glibmm and libsigc++.
CVS access
At the moment, the only way to get the Brockmaestro source code (warning: it doesn't do much yet) is through CVS, the Concurrent Version System. To do this, you will need a CVS client installed - the command-line CVS client is bundled with most Linux distributions.
To use the command-line CVS, open a terminal, cd into the parent directory of the location to which you want to download, and type the following:
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/brockmaestro login
When asked for a password, just press Enter. This will log you into the SourceForge.net CVS server.
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/brockmaestro co brockmaestro
The 'co brockmaestro' command performs a checkout from CVS which should download all the source files into a folder called 'brockmaestro'.
Compiling and installing
To compile, you will need GNU make and all the correct libraries. cd into the ' brockmaestro' directory and run:
./configure
This checks for the right libraries and creates Makefiles. If it doesn't give you any errors (because you're very lucky) run:
make
This compiles the source code into the executable file brockmaestro. If you don't want to install it into your main system (installing is discouraged at this stage) you can run it by cd-ing into the 'brockmaestro' directory and running:
./brockmaestro
If you do want to install it fully, as root, run:
make install
Installing the fonts
For the renderer to function properly, you need to install the fonts FetaMod.ttf and FetaMod-2.ttf onto your system. This is usually done by copying them into /usr/share/fonts/local and running a few commands, but the method is different depending on your distribution.
Using Brockmaestro
At the moment, since the interface is very basic, Brockmaestro is controlled by commands which are typed into the box at the bottom of the window. Documentation for these commands is in the Help file, in the 'brockmaestro' directory.
There are a few .bs files in the directory which have been used to test the program. These can be opened and displayed.
The 'Zoom In' and 'Zoom Out' buttons are self-explanatory, and you can pan around by dragging with the mouse wheel (or middle button.)
Have fun with this very early version, and if you feel like contributing, see the details above!
