MusicTools

MusicTools is a small application for generating music, consisting of currently two tools: Scale Explorer and Melody Creator.

Watch a Demo on YouTube

Scale Explorer

Scale Explorer uses a binary system for defining scales, inspired by A study of musical scales by Ian Ring.

Here are the features:

• Pick a scale by turning on and off bits and selecting a root note.
• Easily find chords within the scale.
• Listen to playback of both chord and scale.
• Copy the chord or scale into Melody Creator.
• Rotate to find scales within the same family or to invert chords.
• View chord name and scale name in the sidebar.

Melody Creator

Melody Creator uses mathematical expressions to generate melodies.

Here are the features:

• Select time signature, tempo, length, and scale.
• Create reusable expressions, each assigned a letter from A-Z.
• View the reusable expressions as graphs.
• Define note pitch, duration, velocity, and type by expressions.
• Listen to playback of the generated melody.
• Save and load melodies to/from MIDI.

Making Changes

This is for people who want to make alterations to the code of the program.

1. Pull the repository unto your computer with Git or download it from GitHub.
2. Setup a virtual environment in the root directory of the project.
3. Enter the virtual environment in your IDE and the terminal.
4. Use a package manager like pip to install the packages in the requirements.txt file.
5. Make the wanted changes to the code.
6. Run streamlit run main.py in the terminal to test the changes.

Building Changes

These instructions assume that you've done the steps under Making Changes.

1. If your changes uses any new packages not from the standard library, these must be added to the requirements.txt file. If you've added a lot of imports, you can use the pipreqs package to collect the requirements.

   • Install pipreqs in the virtual environment with your package manager.

   • Run pipreqs in the terminal. The requirement.txt file will now contain all imported packages.

2. Install the pyinstaller package in the virtual environment with your package manager.

3. Run pyinstaller --onefile run.py --clean in the terminal. This will generate a run.spec file in the directory.

4. Add the following code in the beginning of the run.spec file:

from PyInstaller.utils.hooks import collect_data_files, copy_metadata

datas = [("project_env/Lib/site-packages/streamlit/runtime", "./streamlit/runtime")]
datas += collect_data_files("streamlit")
datas += copy_metadata("streamlit")

5. Replace project_env/Lib with the path to the site_packages directory in your virtual environment directory.

6. In run.spec, set pathex to this:

a = Analysis(
    ...
    pathex=["."],
    ...
)

7. In run.spec, write all imports under hiddenimports. For example:

a = Analysis(
    ...
    hiddenimports=["midiutil", "mido", "numpy", "plotly", "pygame", "pyperclip", "st_pages", "streamlit", "streamlit_extras.switch_page_button", "filedialogs"],
    ...
)

8. Run pyinstaller run.spec --clean in the terminal. In the dist directory, you will find run.exe.

9. To test the build, you need to copy any files used by the application into the dist directory (while maintaining their original directory structure). By default it should look like this:

dist/
├─ lib/
├─ pages/
├─ res/
├─ main.py
├─ license.txt
├─ run.exe

10. Now go ahead and run run.exe. The application should start now.

11. If you get an error that an import is missing, add it to the hiddenimports variable and run pyinstaller run.spec --clean again.

If something still isn't working, feel free to let me know. I will gladly try to help you out.

Distribution

If you want to more easily distribute your version, you can use something like Inno Setup to create an installer.

Just make sure the structure of the dist directory is maintained when installing.