This is an introduction to my songbook project. Songbook is a collection of sheet music from songs. I really wanted to make my own digital songbook, and here it is! There are lots of benefits to have my own songbook:
- Getting familiar with a song, without confusion about different versions.
- Grabbing handy sheet music or chords anytime when I feel like playing guitar, piano, accordion or just singing.
- Making it a personal music library by adding other things like embedded videos, comments on practising, background, …
I’ve been exploring the way to build it. I tried a songbook PDF rendering system called Bard but it was too complicated and only for marking chords on lyrics. When I switched to Quarto for blogging, I also found a way to render music sheets – ABCjs which works pretty well in this blog.
ABCjs is a javascript framework to render music sheets written in ABC notation. ABC notation is known as the Markdown language for music sheet, so it can be easily incorporated in Markdown-based blogging system theoretically. For Quarto blogs, it can be rendered from raw javascripts from ABCjs. One thing to note is that they even provide audio features: player, MIDI, timbres, which makes a scorewriter software like Musescore come true in a browser. It’s a portable and lightweight system right in my blog, so that I don’t have to rely on any other softwares.
- ABC notation documentation for how to encode music sheets: https://abcnotation.com/wiki/abc:standard:v2.2
- ABC MIDI documentation for audio settings like timbres, volumes when the sheets are turned into audio: https://abcmidi.sourceforge.io
- ABCjs documentation for how to add the elements made from ABC notation in web pages: https://paulrosen.github.io/abcjs/
I have already set up the environment for this blog. Take your time to browse the types of music I enjoy, and, enjoy it! :)
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