Technical Materials

Library

For Alternate-Take we will try to use the minimum set of coherent library to perform the most professional render. Those choice have been already taken, I selected the Qt framework which is insteresting for it's graphical interface, SAX style parser interface and also for its STL (Standart Template Library) implementation. So far this library gave me full satisfaction, it has never shown bugs, plus it is very well documented.

For the font rendering, I choose the Freetype 2 library. It has a good antialiasing render, according to its designer it is light and portable... We will see. Freetype but it sometimes experiments bugs due to its ealy age. I'm using it as a static library because since Alternate Take use every Freetype features and because it is light, the installation procedure will be more easy and not have dependencies with freetype.

The permanent storage format also use a particular technology, it is Music XML. The advantage of using such a file format is that :

• XML is naturally extensible and implies natural backward compatibility.
• MusicXML is not only designed for score rendering, centering our application on this data format forces us to make a adaptable framework.

If one of these Qt changes APIS the whole project will tumble. While Freetype and MusicXml are only extremity. So migrating to other techs should be hard work but not unfeasible.

Musical Concepts