Support loading .scl and .kbm files

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#19,564 11 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
cpp
Domain
desktop

Research direction

Start by reviewing the issue's MTS-ESP prior-art link and defining how .scl and .kbm support, MTS-ESP integration, and multiple mapping channels relate. Done would require an agreed implementation scope and acceptance criteria for loading mapping tables and supporting the described microtonal workflows.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

feature request
Your idea

Basically, I'm thinking that we need support for MTS-ESP, as well as .scl files and .kbm files so that MuseScore can support existing mapping tables, and we could also benefit from both having multiple mapping channels, so that lumatone users might be better able to use MuseScore, and so that advanced tuning systems can be supported.

Problem to be solved

Currently, retuning MuseScore's notes for other tuning systems involves manually retuning each note by cents and then copy-pasting- this is a laborious and error-prone process. Furthermore, the current method of tuning in cents is more limited in precision, which is sometimes a problem for advanced equal temperament systems. Having support for these additional file types would make the process of writing in other tuning systems much easier.

Prior art

Most notation software has very limited support for microtonality, while the few DAWs that support microtonality are generally limited by having only 128 notes available in MIDI, thus necessitating multiple piano rolls for more advanced tuning systems such as 159tet and 311tet, the latter of which is renowned for its ability to approximate Just Intonation. MuseScore, with the right innovations, could help microtonal composers get past the aforementioned limitations. So far, Oddsounds has support for other tunings systems, and we could use portions of that library as a basis for handling internal standards.

https://github.com/ODDSound/MTS-ESP

Additional context

I've been writing microtonal music in MuseScore for a few years now, especially in 159tet, so I know some of the problems that I face.

Dominant language
C++
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