Show HN: MTXT – Music Text Format • Hacker News Board

Show HN: MTXT – Music Text Format

#1

Post by daninet » Sun, Nov 30, 2025, 10:21 AM UTC

Show HN: MTXT – Music Text Format
github.com

Re: Show HN: MTXT – Music Text Format

#2

Post by yaoke259 » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 12:32 PM UTC

pretty cool!

Re: Show HN: MTXT – Music Text Format

#3

Post by 1313ed01 » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 12:44 PM UTC

I like the idea overall. Looks like something that would be fun to combine with music programming languages (SuperCollider/Of etc).

Not so sure how human-friendly the fractional beats are? Is that something that people more into music than I am are comfortable with? I would have expected something like MIDIs "24 ticks per quarter note" instead. And a format like bar.beat.tick. Maybe just because that is what I am used to.

Re: Show HN: MTXT – Music Text Format

#4

Post by rock_artist » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 1:04 PM UTC

Hey, the idea is nice, It would be great to know what pushed you to start this format.

Also, any apps that uses it would benefit from being add to the repo assuring usability in addition to readibility.

Re: Show HN: MTXT – Music Text Format

#5

Post by giladvdn » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 1:05 PM UTC

Probably stating the obvious here, but this would be a good way for an LLM to attempt to write or modify music.

Re: Show HN: MTXT – Music Text Format

#6

Post by gilrain » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 1:23 PM UTC

How does this compare to standard ABC? More capable, presumably, but a comparison would be useful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_notation https://abcnotation.com/

Re: Show HN: MTXT – Music Text Format

#7

Post by intrasight » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 1:28 PM UTC

I think that for completeness it needs looping and conditional constructs

Re: Show HN: MTXT – Music Text Format

#8

Post by dghf » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 1:33 PM UTC

Similar things:

* Perl MIDI::Score -- https://metacpan.org/pod/MIDI::Score

* Csound standard numeric scores -- https://csound.com/docs/manual/ScoreTop.html

* CsBeats (alternative score language for Csound) -- https://csound.com/docs/manual/CsBeats.html

Re: Show HN: MTXT – Music Text Format

#9

Post by vessenes » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 2:20 PM UTC

Cool. My one concern with this is that it has no horizontally scannable note/chord mode. It’s super common for humans to read a sequence of notes left to right, or write it that way, but it’s also just more efficient in terms of scanning / reading.

Can I suggest a guarded mode that specifies how far apart each given note/chord is by the count, e.g.

  #1.0:verse1 
  Am - C - G - E - F F F F
  #

You could then repeat this or overlay a melody line like

  #0.25:melody1
  C4 - C4 - C4 D4 C4 - D4 - D4 - D4 E4 D4 -
  #

Etc. I think this would be easier to parse and produce for an LLM, and it’s would compile back to the original spec easily as well.

Re: Show HN: MTXT – Music Text Format

#10

Post by bonzini » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 2:35 PM UTC

dghf wrote: post #8

Similar things: * Perl MIDI::Score -- https://metacpan.org/pod/MIDI::Score * Csound standard numeric scores -- https://csound.com/docs/manual/ScoreTop.html * CsBeats (alternative score language for Csound) -- https://csound.com/docs/manual/CsBeats.html

Lilypond, too. Though it needs a full scheme interpreter to evaluate macros (provided by both the system and the user), it can emit midi files.