SongTrellis
Music and Musical Know-how For You

The Excerpt Service allows you to create custom MIDI sequences and printable scores for many tunes that are available on the SongTrellis site.

Using the First Bar and Last Bar edit boxes you can specify the location of an excerpt within a tune. When you press the "Play" or "Loop" buttons, the excerpt specified will be clipped out of the selected score and saved as a new MIDI sequence that will be delivered to your web browser. A printable score recorded in jpg format will also be created and delivered to your browser.

Your browser will play the excerpt as a background sound on your excerpt request page, a link that will allow you to download the sound will be created, and the printable score will be displayed at the bottom of the page. If you right click on the score image using a a Windows or control-click on a Macintosh, most browsers will display a dropdown menu which will allow you to save your own copy of the excerpt score.

Using the "Display" dropdown menu, you can request that the printable score displayed for the tune be displayed for transposing instruments, those which require music to be transposed from concert key . The score for requested instrument type will be delivered the next instant that you press the "Play" or "Loop" buttons.

Using the "Transpose Original Score" dropdown menu, you can request that the MIDI sequence of your selection be transposed up or down by the interval size specified by the enrties of the dropdown list. The transposed MIDI sequence and a score to match will be delivered to your browser when you press the "Play" or "Loop" buttons

The "Download OPML Index for this Score" link will cause an index to be delivered to you, recorded in OPML format. If you open this with Dave Winer's OPML Editor or Userland's "Radio Userland", the index document, which describes this score in detail, will be displayed in outline form. These applications are available for Windows and Macintosh. The subheadings of the index outline are linked so that different excerpts from this score will be downloaded for you whenever you press a link. The outline contains subheading sequences that point to each phrase in every voice of the score, and other subheading sequences which point to every bar within the score.

Using these outline applications, you can quickly launch excerpt requests without having to type parameters into the excerpt dialog. The excerpt selection parameters are stored within subheading links recorded in the score's outline, which are sent to the SongTrellis server when you click on a subheading within the outline. By selecting across a range of phrase or bar subheadings within the outline and issuing a Deliver Excerpt command, you can request that an excerpt consisting of several adjacent phrases or bars from the score be delivered to you without having to explicitly type in the numerical coordinates which specify the boundaries of the selection that you request.

This service demonstrates the capabilities of the SongTrellis Music Editor, an application for Macintosh computers that is in limited beta test. If you'd like to beta test, send me an email.

When you play a tune excerpt using the excerpt service, a copy of the the selected tune's MIDI sequence is delivered to a Macintosh that runs a special copy of the Music Editor, which is able to respond to web server requests. In a fraction of a second, the editor opens the MIDI sequence, selects the excerpt specified in the request, copies and pastes that to a new score, saves that score in MIDI format, formats it prettily, saves the first page of the score in JPG format and delivers the new MIDI sequence and printable JPG score back to the SongTrellis server for delivery to your web browser.