Sheet Music (2020)

Introduction

This is a follow-up to my post which focused on my self-hosted sheet music site ([link]({% post_url 2018-12-30-sheets %})).

Cytoid

So… I never actually got in contact with the dev. It seems like the pipeline for Cytoid might not be as seemless and bug-free as I thought. The Cytoid login broke because my password was too long, so I think I’m going to stick with my solution.

Repo Migration

I moved a chunk of my repos from my personal Git server to GitLab.com. This allowed me to:

• Get stuff off my server
• Make stuff publicly accessible
• Move stuff back to server (GitLab CE) if necessary

I have added the theme and plugin to GitLab. This repo migration had its own fair share of issues which probably needs it’s own post.

Update: I decided not to make a post on the migration because of time constraints and recollection issues.

Grav + Minio = ???

Grav isn’t a CDN, so I didn’t want to use it as one. I wanted to move as many assets as possible to Minio (self-hosted S3). Grav doesn’t support this and makes it actively hard for you to do (link).

My ‘clever’ solution was to rewrite links using Nginx so that browsers will load assets from Minio without needing to modify Grav.

# Use S3 / Minio bucket for serving PDFs and Downloadables
# Replace "https://play.minio.io:9000/" with your S3 / Minio endpoint
rewrite ^/user/pages/01.sheets/(.*) https://play.minio.io:9000/sheets/$1 redirect;

I disabled this since my Minio instance wasn’t performing that well. I also encountered an odd issue related to PDF rendering in Google Chrome when the rewrite was enabled.

Musescore 3.0 Dev Build File Format

The early dev builds of Musescore 3.0 used a file format that is incompatible with all stable releases of Musescore.

The first transcription I uploaded to my site, “Nahyuta Sahdmadhi - The Last Rites Prosecutor”, used one of those dev builds. The reason was that Musescore 2 didn’t have all the features I needed for the piece and Musescore 3 wasn’t stable yet.

The proper solution is to use a build of Musescore 3 which is compatible with both file formats for converting to the new file format.

There’s only one issue, all builds which support both file formats have been removed from the site and archives.

My hacky solution was to use an archived Nightly Build from 2017 (link), which didn’t support the new file format.

It did, however, support export to MusicXML.

I tried importing the MusicXML file into the latest stable build of Musescore and… I got a result.

The MusicXML export / import ended up breaking the layout in a major way which I didn’t know how to fix.

I made a post on the Musescore forums to see if I could find the elusive build.

Thanks to the help of “Jojo-Schmitz”, I was able to get a copy of this build (more details on this in “Future Work”).

So, I used the new build to do the conversion and… I got a slightly less broken result.

This was a lot more straightforward than the MusicXML conversion process and produced a better file, but it still had some issues when I loaded it up in the latest stable release.

What was previously a 1 page piece was now a 2 page piece, which leads me to belive that the automatic layout logic changed somewhere in-between these 2 builds.

Malware?

For some odd reason (my guess is domain name length), Palo Alto Networks flagged my domain (and all subdomains) as “Malware”. I submitted a request to fix this and it is now recategorized as “Computer and Internet Info”.

I don’t know how many views I might have lost because of this, but this probably caused some issues during my job search.

Attempted Migration from Grav

Grav was the best CMS option for the site at the time of building, but now it’s starting to show some weak points.

Based on this, I tried (and failed) to rewrite both the theme and plugin systems in Hakyll and Jekyll.

Hakyll is a Static CMS written in Haskell. Hakyll required too much effort to get working, so I switched to Jekyll.

Jekyll is a popular Static CMS written in Ruby. My main site and my blog (this site) use Jekyll.

The main issue with porting the sheets site over to Jekyll was because of differences between Twig and Liquid (the tempating engines used by Grav and Jekyll respectively).

My Twig Templating code makes extensive usage of macros: little reusable template functions that you can define inside the template.

This feature is not present in Liquid and would require some major redesign to work around, so I got lazy and gave up.

Future Work

• Attempt to Migrate away from Grav

  I’m going to try to migrate away from Grav towards something like Gatsby at some point, but I have some time before I look into that.

  Update: I ported the site to Jekyll and am no longer using Grav.

• Debug Auto Layout Changes from Musescore 3.0 to 3.5

  I’m also going to do more testing involving the automatic layout changes in Musescore between versions in order to debug things.

  Update: I gave up on debugging and made some manual changes to the layout so that the output fits on 1 page again.

• Request Preservation of Dev Build

  Finally, I would to ask for Musescore to add the ever-elusive nightly build mentioned above to their archive, since it’s important for conversion purposes. I made a forum post (link) in hopes of getting this fixed.

  Update: No response as of 10/15/2020. If any of y’all want a copy of the elusive dev build, lmk and I’ll give you my copy.