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I was bored a few years ago, and transcribed the tune out. I did very little else to it other than picks some sounds that they might have used in the first place. So, it's only a four-voice tune, representative of the hardware of the time. It would be easy to fill out and make it thicker, but part of the charm of the tune that it sounds good, with such a limited sound technology. Enjoy.

Good PDF scores use font embedding. Since the truetype fonts are embedded, they remain very small. Take a look at the ones on my website for an example. The PDFs are astoundingly small -- about the size of the corresponsing corresponding .ETF file, which is ASCII-encoded, just like an XML data file would be! And that's just with ps2pdf.com -- Acrobat does even better.

Example: on my site, Moanin' in (the program's own) ETF format is 305K. The PDF is 299K. If you look at the innards of the ETF, you'll realize it's awfully close what an XML-style data format would be. The first example is a 15-page score with 16 staves, and it's less than a meg!

So MusicXML would scale better than PDFs exactly how?

But for collaboration across multiple programs, of course you need some common editable format.

Viewing something on the web, which is the point of a browser plugin usually isn't for editing and collaboration. If I want people to be able to see and print my scores with ease, I put up a PDF, and nearly everyone can read it. If I put it up in MusicXML format, then they have to go get some random plugin, if one exists for free.

I'm not saving MusicXML would not be useful for saving as a data format. I'm all for it! I'm saying we already have a good enough technology for viewing and printing documents over the web.

So I put my scores up in PDF; for free with ps2pdf.com. You can print them, they look fine, and it already works. Today.

I do my scores in PDF, if I want people to be able to read and print them. Yeah, the PDF is a bit ugly on screen because of Finale's strange linestroke style, but it prints out just fine. I also use ps2pdf.com, the scores do look much better with Acrobat.

(Note all of my more complex scores are not on the web. I usually only print out copies for those I give out or sell to, and rarely send out the electronic masters. People might photocopy my scores, but I'm sure not going to make it any easier for them.)

Now, if someone wants to play back the score, or edit it, then they need the actual .MUS (or .ETF) file from Finale. The only time I've ever needed this when collaborating on a score with a friend over email. It's really difficult because there's no way to merge changes or diff them.

Saving to this format would be handy, because I've been compelled to upgrade a few times when working with someone who has a newer version of Finale than I do. Unlike Word, my friend cannot simply say "Save As..." and select an older file version!

But unless they retrofit it into older versions of Finale, oh well...

That's the sorriest ass MIDI I ever heard, with about as much musical sensibility as a jackhammer. And it's also missing one voice, which in a four-voice song is 25% of the harmony.

Try this one instead.

Reproduced for the terminaly lazy:

First of all, this is a great example of how not to write a Palm version of the site, and here's why. Offline readers depend on "link-depth" to traverse a site. However, their Palm version breaks each story into a random number of small chunks. So, you can't just page-down to read a long story or a bunch of comments- you have to click on lots and lots of links. A real pain. Lots of small links makes sense on a slow online connection, but it's awful when you have more bandwidth available, as your desktop PC or an offline browser.

Additionally, it's restricted to 10 comments, not a threshold. That's boring. I'm sitting here in Jiffy Lube picking my nose, I wanna read some funny trolls and flamewars!

Finally, using /. in "light" mode doesn't work either. There are too many useless links on the front page. I don't care about the advertising or the FAQ or all the other stuff: I want the stories and the comments. Basically, the readers I use so far have no way to "prune" sections of the tree you don't care about. This causes the site to be gigantic and not fit into the paltry 8MB of your typical handheld, or, it fits, but it so big as to detract from its usefulness.

Finally, someone did the right thing: AvantSlash takes the page, filters out all the crap you don't care about, and doesn't break it up into a thousand chunks so it's readable.

In order to make that usable, I'd have to pump my link depth to something like 4 in order to read the stories. Plus, for the first time in months, slashdot.org has stopped serving 403's to sync.avantgo.com, which basically killed it's usefulnes... (It was one of the first sites I tried to sync to my iPaq via AvantGo, and until today, everytime I tried, I'd get access denied errors reading it when I tried to sync.)

AvantSlash allows you to read Slashdot on your Palm or WinCE device through AvantGo.

You could point Avantgo directly at the slashdot website, but you'll find that due to the sheer mass of links, your limit will be reached pretty quickly. You could point Avantgo at the palm version of Slashdot at http://www.slashdot.org/palm but it has a number of problems. Here is what Scott Tringali had to say about it on kuro5hin:

First of all, this is a great example of how not to write a Palm version of the site, and here's why. Offline readers depend on "link-depth" to traverse a site. However, their Palm version breaks each story into a random number of small chunks. So, you can't just page-down to read a long story or a bunch of comments- you have to click on lots and lots of links. A real pain. Lots of small links makes sense on a slow online connection, but it's awful when you have more bandwidth available, as your desktop PC or an offline browser.

Additionally, it's restricted to 10 comments, not a threshold. That's boring. I'm sitting here in Jiffy Lube picking my nose, I wanna read some funny trolls and flamewars!

Finally, using /. in "light" mode doesn't work either. There are too many useless links on the front page. I don't care about the advertising or the FAQ or all the other stuff: I want the stories and the comments. Basically, the readers I use so far have no way to "prune" sections of the tree you don't care about. This causes the site to be gigantic and not fit into the paltry 8MB of your typical handheld, or, it fits, but it so big as to detract from its usefulness.

Finally, someone did the right thing: AvantSlash takes the page, filters out all the crap you don't care about, and doesn't break it up into a thousand chunks so it's readable.

Thanks for listening.

I must be nuts, 'cause these look anti-aliased to me.