README

The shared engine behind the sheetmusic Moodle plugin suite: a document model, ABC and MusicXML serialisers, a MIDI importer, playback, and a bundled Verovio engraver, all running client-side.

This plugin provides no user interface of its own. It exists so that its two consumers render notation identically:

Plugin	Role
`filter_sheetmusic`	Displays scores wherever Moodle renders text
`tiny_sheetmusic`	Authors scores in Moodle's editor

What the note editor can and cannot do

The editing surface opens on a staff you can click on and type into. It is deliberately a Tier 1 editor, and the limits are worth knowing before you plan a lesson around it:

Can	Cannot
One staff, one voice	Grand staff, several voices, chords
Note lengths from semibreve to semiquaver, with one or two dots	Breves, tuplets
Rests, ties, sharps, flats and naturals	Slurs, articulations, dynamics
Key signature, time signature and clef	Lyrics, repeats, layout breaks

Anything the model cannot hold is refused rather than approximated. A score with chords or tuplets in it still opens, still engraves and can still be edited as ABC in the source tab; the note-entry tab says plainly that it cannot place notes on that score instead of quietly dropping what it has no room for. Double sharps and double flats are kept and displayed if an import brings them in, but the toolbar and the keyboard offer only single accidentals.

Playing a score

Every rendered score carries a play button, a cursor that marks the note being heard, and a speed control. The sound is synthesised in the browser with Web Audio: no samples are downloaded, nothing is sent to a server, and the plugin carries no audio files. It is a clean synthesised tone rather than a recorded instrument — enough to hear an exercise, check an interval or follow a line, and not a substitute for a real performance.

Playback never starts on its own, only one score plays at a time, and a browser without Web Audio is shown no control rather than one that does nothing. Site administrators can turn it off for the whole site under Site administration → Plugins → Local plugins → Sheet music.

Requirements

Moodle 4.5 or later. Nothing else — the suite has no server-side dependencies.

Design documents

Comments in this plugin refer to DESIGN.md, RELATIONS.md and the P0-FINDINGS-* notes by bare name. Those are the sheet music suite's development records and are deliberately not shipped inside the plugin: they cover all three plugins together and change on a different rhythm from the code. RELATIONS.md in particular is the normative contract between the plugins - the stored <pre class="sheetmusic sheetmusic-abc"> format, the engine's public module API, and the editor and filter coupling - and is the document to read before changing either side of a boundary.

They are kept with the suite's development documentation alongside the source repositories rather than in this one.

Licence

GPL v3 or later. Bundled third-party libraries are declared in thirdpartylibs.xml.

adamjenkins / moodle-local_sheetmusic

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