LUA: Open a midi region in musescore

jmantra · March 7, 2024, 6:03pm

This is a follow up to another topic I made about launching an external program from within Ardour (Launch an external application with LUA)

My whole goal there was to have Ardour open up a midi region in musescore.

Well I have achieved that, although, in not the most ideal way. In the original post I was having trouble executing musescore directly, so I found a workaround of having the script create a cron job and opening it that way.

I now have a fully working script, I have only tested it with my machine setup ( Debian Bookworm) and with musescore 2

The way it works is it gets the direct file path of the region on the disk, creates a temporary cronjob then erases the cronjob after a delay. There is also some dialog boxes that gives the user some tips if musescore is not opening up and let’s them know to wait up to 1 minute before musescore opens up since it’s a cron job.

Here is a video demonstrating the script:

Here is the script if you want to try it out yourself: https://github.com/jmantra/Ardour-scripts/blob/main/mscoreex.lua

Feedback, suggestions, and PRs are welcome though I ask that if you are going to provide feedback, please go easy as I am still kind of newish at programming.

Hopefully someone finds this useful.

jmantra · April 9, 2024, 12:53am

Updated version of this script, now uses musescore in the background to convert to PDF then open said PDF in Firefox. Still working why I can’t launch the file directly from within the LUA script (can launch musescore by itself with no file specified) or why this script won’t work at all in Wayland. (Not that I am currently fan of Wayland, but I know that is where things are headed right now).

github.com

jmantra/LogicalArdour/blob/main/mscoreex.lua

ardour {
	["type"] = "EditorAction",
	name = "Musescore - Open Midi region in musical notation format",
	author      = "Justin Ehrlichman",
description = [[
Takes a selected MIDI region, converts it to a PDF using musescore then opens up the PDF in Firefox
]]
}

function factory () return function (signal, ...)

local md = LuaDialog.Message ("Open Musical Score", "If Firefox shows a blank page, you may have to wait a minute or two for Ardour to write the file to disk", LuaDialog.MessageType.Info, LuaDialog.ButtonType.Close)
	print (md:run())

	md = nil
	collectgarbage ()

	local md = LuaDialog.Message ("Open Musical Score", "To continue using Ardour you will need to close the Firefox window or the tab the score is open in", LuaDialog.MessageType.Info, LuaDialog.ButtonType.Close)
	print (md:run())

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jmantra · April 21, 2024, 1:41am

In case anyone cares, I now have it so it launches Musescore directly.

Edit: This now also works in Wayland.

github.com

jmantra/LogicalArdour/blob/main/mscoreex.lua

ardour {
	["type"] = "EditorAction",
	name = "Musescore - Open Midi region in musical notation format",
	author      = "Justin Ehrlichman",
description = [[
Takes a selected MIDI region and opens it in Musescore
]]
}

function factory () return function (signal, ...)

local md = LuaDialog.Message ("Open Musical Score", "If Musescore shows a blank page, you may have to wait a minute or two for Ardour to write the file to disk", LuaDialog.MessageType.Info, LuaDialog.ButtonType.Close)
	print (md:run())

	md = nil
	collectgarbage ()

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