Some neat programs for musicians that I have ran across.
GNU Solfege
For those of you who want to improve your ear skills (hearing intervals, naming chords), GNU Solfege is a nice little open source utility. There are a lot of exercises built in, and the program is designed to make the creation of new exercises really simple. I use it for a few minutes each day to improve my perception of intervals and intonation.
Daily Printed Sheet Music from Flutetunes.com
Flutetunes.com is run by a pair of flute players. Each day they release a piece of out-of-copyright sheet music that they have transcribed into PDF form. Their site is a great way to find readable copies of old sheet music, and also provides a nice source of sight-reading material.
But having to go and print a new piece of music each day is kinda annoying. Wouldn’t it be awesome if your computer just printed it out each morning?
I decided to write a simple bash script that does exactly that (mine runs on my Raspberry Pi. A cron job runs the script each morning. The script checks for any new music on Flutetunes and prints whatever it hasn’t seen before (its database is a text file). The hardest part is configuring your printer to work with your linux server, but the comments should give you and idea of how to do it.
Python Practice Scripts
I wrote some scripts for Python for iOS that I occasionally use during my practice. They mostly do really simple, mundane things, but they might be useful to someone.