Sprint 71 “Lur” finished

After nearly two years, which should have been only four weeks according to the original plan, we finally released Sprint 71 today. The last two years were full of work, including the construction of my new home (see my blog, in German), so I had nearly no time left for Zong!. Fortunately, the last weeks I found time again to work on it, and I (again…) intend to continue with it during the coming year.

The goal of Spring 71 was to improve the stability of the MusicXML import and of the layout engine. Indeed, we managed to collect lots of MusicXML files from all over the web (about 12.000 pieces), some with great quality, some with little errors and poor quality, and now we are able to load and layout them all. Of course, the layout quality is still not good enough to publish a version of Zong! for real end users, but at least we can now focus on specific problems, one after the other. We can not publish the test files because of copyright issues, but we run the tests internally.

Another good – and public – overview of the current MusicXML import and layout progress is provided by our implementation of the Unofficial MusicXML Test Suite. There is a status report and a visual report, which brings our layout results face to face with the Lilypond renderings.

2016-12-31 Test Suite

For the next sprint, we are planning to improve the stability of midi-out and the rendering on Android devices and with HTML/JS. Happy new year! 🙂