Category Archives: Using Zong!

Zong! Player ready for Java Web Start

The Zong! Player is an open source audio player for MusicXML scores. It is also possible to convert MusicXML files to other audio formats like MIDI, OGG, WAV and MP3 (if LAME is installed). The program is now based on JavaFX 8 and can be started by clicking on the following button:

http://java.com/js/webstart.png

Oracle has spent some effort to increase the security of Java applets and applications. Therefor, Java Web Start applications have now to be signed using a trusted certificate. Being an open source project, Zong! got a free certificate from Certum. Thank you very much for your support!

Zong! 0.4 released

Yesterday, we pushed version 0.4 (aka p0.4.54) of Zong! onto our servers. From the view of a user there are not many new features compared to the alpha version released on christmas 2010, but the overall architecture has changed dramatically, as described in the blog posts during this year.

The next days we will create a detailled plan for version 0.5. We want to release a usable beta version of the Zong! Editor in October 2011. Of course, one of our main goals is also to improve MusicXML loading and musical layouting during the next months, to make Zong! a competitive viewer for MusicXML documents.

Zong! Intonation Training

As the conductor of a bavarian brass band I often have to intonate the different instruments in the orchestra. Because I found no website where you can practice your intonation hearing, I decided to write my own one and share it for free.

Here is a demo video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7z9XQfGbrg]

The program can be launched by clicking on the following button:

Have fun!

A little present

Merry Christmas 🙂 As a little present, we are happy to announce the release of the alpha versions of the Zong! Viewer and Zong! Player, which are both licensed under the GPL.

Interested developers can check out the source code in our public Git repository. We have also prepared a demo for the Zong! Viewer. Notice, that you need Java 6 to run the applications.

We hope that this release encourages some people to join our development team. If you are interested, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Zong! is on the way

Welcome to the Zong! blog. Zong! is a new music notation software which is currently developed by Xenoage Software. In this blog, we will talk about the latest news and will also discuss related topics like MusicXML or programming. We appreciate your feedback, so please tell us if you have any ideas how we can improve our software 🙂

Zong! consists of two parts: On the one hand, we will release the Zong! Viewer as free software, probably under the GPL. This application allows to view, print and playback MusicXML files, and is available both as a desktop application and as an applet, which means, that it can be used without any installation in every webbrowser supporting Java. Here is a screenshot of an early version of the viewer, running in a browser window:

Screenshot of the applet, 2009-08-06

On the other hand, there is the Zong! Editor, which includes all features of the viewer but also allows creating and editing scores. We hope that this commercial application will finance our work.

We plan to release the viewer in late 2009, and we hope to publish a first beta version of the editor in late 2010. Stay tuned!