As some of you know, I’m playing a guitar, and recently a feadog. This of course means that one of the things I’m gathering are chords, tabulatures and tunes.
For last few years I missed a songbook of my own that would cover everything I like to play, something that I could just take with me on a tent camp. Of course I have many songbooks but none of them is enough so I usually have to take all of them while I use only four or five chords from the whole book :/ Another problem is with my own chords.
I started trying to create my own songbook while ago, using either Koffice or OpenOffice. The issue is – I’m a nerd. I don’t want to simply write a text and put capital letter D, A and G somewhere around. I want a markup. I want symantic. I want to be able to extract any piece of data later. I want to be able to change the translation of the song while keeping chords in place. I want to be able to put tunes or tabulatures anywhere around without a problem and connect them with words of the song.
There is ChordML, MusicXML, MML, but none of them serves what I need. (with ChordML being pretty near I think).
So, I’m going to try to figure out if ChordML could be modified to suite my needs or not. In either case I’d like to spend some time on this project and have some nice XML files with my songs soon, with XSL sheets to export it to ODF or XHTML.
How nerdy it is? 🙂
One reply on “SongML?”
So what is it about MusicXML that doesn’t meet your needs? It’s supported by over 75 music programs, including a lot of tablature editors. Couldn’t you use one of them to create your tabs and save the results out in MusicXML? Then you have your files in a universally accessible format with the full semantic control that you are looking for. Good luck with your music!