On 8/2/05, B. Watson <atari@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
> > gave an "Illegal Note" error....is there something where "b" isn't
> > treated the same way as in German notation as it is in American?
>
> In Germany, a B is written as H, and a Bb (B flat) is written as B...
> which is why J. S. Bach was able to use his last name as a sequence of
> notes in some symphony or other (B A C H = B-flat, A, C, B to you and me).
Yeah, I had heard about the B A C H thing -- heh, come to think of it
those are the same intervals I use for the intro to JoustPong, though
it doesn't sound as good on the keyboard vs the C Eb D C# progression
I made it on...which is a good lesson for me, since I tend to forget
that not all transpositions are created equal.
Still, calling Bb B and B natural H seems inconsistent to my engineery
mind, relative to the A through G notation I'm used to.
<attempt="funny">I mean, I thought if ANYONE would strive for
consistency and precision in their musical notation, it would be the
Germans...</attempt>
> > So is that thing just knowing what the well-tempered frequencies
> > "should be", and finding the set of closest matches for the 2600
> > frequencies for the notes desired?
Sorry, I should have been more sepcific and mentioned I knew were only
concerned about relative, not absolute values. but you bring up a lot
of good points about certain notes being more important than others,
and it being better if everything were flat than if some were flat and
some were sharp...
> I have no idea how much of this Thomas's tool takes into account...
>
> > You know thinking about these little command line apps vs. my habit of
> > making webtools...webtools add to the convenience but they're harder
> > to preserve if something hanppens to the main site. I've been pretty
> > dedicated (for over 10 years now!) to the maintenence of my site, but
> > unless someone backs up my code once I'm gone, it might follow fairly
> > shortly ...
>
> Best of both worlds: write command line apps, then write web app wrappers
> for them (they read an HTML form and run the command line app for you).
Yeah, that's the traditional way, kind of a screenscrape from STDOUT.
I'm a little limited because usually I have Windows EXEs on hand, but
my webhosting is Linux.
> Believe it or not, some of us (myself included) find web tools highly
> inconvenient compared to a well-designed command line tool, especially
> for small stuff that runs non-interactively. How in the heck do you
> use a web-tool in a Makefile or batch script, as part of your game's
> build process?
"Believe it or not"? Of course I believe it! Sure, for tight
write|compile|run loops, I'm entirely dependent on batch files and
command line tools and of course local emulators.
Web tools tend to be good for one time activities, especially graphics
and sound editing. They can provide a GUI that you expect to run on
almost any dang platform without a big JAVA-y download or what not.
And they can be a little less initimdating to a newbie than a big
download, encouraging poking around more. Those are the only
advantages I think, but they're not trivial. And besides the fact they
aren't readily scriptable, there's that other downside where more
often than not your dependent on the site remaining up.
> I just now went and looked at the original mail about it... somehow it
> slipped right past me the first time around. I think it's a great idea.
>
> Thomas, any chance of us seeing the source?
Thanks for the source. Never tried reading Pascal before.
I wonder if it might be easier to attempt from scratch. I'd tend to
write it in Perl, which for my money has been extremely multiplatform,
with the drawback that you can't generally make compact standalone
executables.
Plus if there was an independent effort, we could compare notes. Literally!
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