FreeDots is a music notation converter primarily for blind users. It can handle input in MusicXML format, a file format typically produced by optical music recognition software.
A user can use their favourite OMR software to scan (and possibly correct) a piece of music, and use FreeDots to transcribe the resulting XML file to braille music notation. Optionally, the music can also be played back.
Braille output is currently implemented using the Unicode Braille row. You will need your environment to be configured to use UTF-8. If you are on Linux console, you will also need the braille fonts from http://brl.thefreecat.org/linux-brl-console.tgz
Requirements: A Java6 Runtime Environment
To run freedots, use the -jar option to the "java" command:
$ java -jar freedots.jar
If you prefer to use FreeDots without the graphical user interface for batch operations or as a pure command-line tool, supply the -nw option (no-window) on the command-line:
$ java -jar freedots.jar -nw bwv1013.xml
FreeDots uses UTF-8 encoded Unicode to output braille dot patterns. This has the big advantage that it works independently of the users braille translation table. Therefore, output of FreeDots can easily be shared between people living in different countries.
In the graphical user interface the dot patterns are also displayed on screen. This allows sighted people that have knowledge of braille music notation to work together with a blind user on a computer. It also allows seamless interchange of digital braille music notation files across the Internet, since the differences between localized braille variants are completely irrelevant if Unicode braille is used. This guarantees the readability of braille music by everyone, no matter what translation table is in use.
Unfortunately, many screen readers do not support unicode braille patterns yet. On Linux console, you will need BRLTTY starting from version 3.10. If you are using Orca on Linux, Unicode braille patterns do work in GNOME terminal even with older versions of BRLTTY. In the meantime, you can use iconv to convert Unicode Braille to BRF format. See the FAQ for details.
FreeDots currently only supports input in MusicXML format. Such files are written by every major optical music recognition software available today. So one way to obtain music for FreeDots to work with (which was the primary motivation to write this program) is to scan sheet music yourself using one of the OMR programs available.
However, there are other sources you can obtain music from:
www.musedata.org has a big collection of baroque music in MuseData and Humdrum formats. There is a hum2xml conversion tool available from http://extras.humdrum.net/man/hum2xml/ which you can use to transform Humdrum files from www.musedata.org into MusicXML. Note that the license of musedata.org prevents redistribution of derived works, so you will have to download and convert the data from musedata.org yourself, we can not provide preconverted MusicXML files for you. Our tests have shown that hum2xml does not always produce correct results when it comes to multiple voices inside a staff.
www.wikifonia.org has a growing collection of lead-sheets for popular and traditional music. While FreeDots does not fully support lead-sheet style MusicXML files yet, you can already extract the melody and lyric of wikifonia.org MusicXML files. Work on support for chord symbols is planned.
www.mutopiaproject.org is a big collection of public domain music in Lilypond format. While we have no Lilypond support at all, the PDF files available for download from www.mutopiaproject.org can usually be processed with OMR software quite easily. There will still be scanning errors, but at least there is a relatively big repository of free sheet music you can readily play with. We will collect MusicXML files produced from mutopiaproject.org sources, since these are free to distribute.
If you produce any freely distributable MusicXML files from public domain sources, we encourage you to consider sending them to mlang@delysid.org so that we can include them with FreeDots to avoid duplicate work by other people.
-- Mario Lang mlang@delysid.org