[Perform-Talk] DottedNotes — bidirectional braille ⇄ LilyPond/MusicXML translator (built out of my own frustration transcribing orchestral scores)

[judith at judithlung.com]

Hi everyone,

I'm a blind composer, and for years my biggest bottleneck wasn't writing 
the music — it was getting it out of braille and into something a 
publisher, ensemble, or sighted collaborator could actually use. 
Transcribing an orchestral score from braille into LilyPond by hand 
could eat several days of work before I'd even gotten to the actual 
engraving and proofing. That grind is what pushed me to build 
DottedNotes.

It's a free, bidirectional translator between:
- Braille music (.brf / .brl)
- LilyPond (.ly, which compiles straight to publication-quality .pdf and 
.midi)
- MusicXML (.musicxml / .mxl)

So you can go from a braille manuscript to a publisher-ready PDF and 
MIDI in one pass, or take a print/MusicXML score and export a proper 
braille edition — with BANA validation built in (standard or strict 
profile), configurable compression levels, and layout presets for solo 
piano, art song, chamber, orchestral, and lead sheet scores, since 
orchestral formatting has its own headaches that a generic converter 
won't get right.

It's also useful if you're a sighted composer, engraver, or publisher 
who needs to move a score between these formats, or produce a braille 
edition without knowing braille music code yourself.

Free to use here: https://www.dottednotes.net/

I built this to solve my own problem, but I know braille music workflows 
vary a lot person to person, so I'd genuinely appreciate feedback from 
other blind musicians — especially anyone who's dealt with the same 
orchestral-score transcription slog. Bug reports, edge cases in the 
braille code handling, feature requests all welcome.
Best,
Judith