[Perform-Talk] DottedNotes update: braille-in-braille-out part extraction, plus BANA-aware error checking

[judith at judithlung.com]

Hi everyone,

I want to share a significant update to DottedNotes 
(www.dottednotes.net), the free, open-source music transcription tool 
I've been building for blind composers and musicians.

A quick recap for anyone new to it: DottedNotes converts between braille 
music (BRF/BRL), LilyPond, and MusicXML, in any direction, and it's free 
— no per-page transcription fees, no software license in the hundreds of 
dollars.

What's new: DottedNotes now supports almost the full range of MusicXML's 
notation features, accepts braille or LilyPond as input in addition to 
MusicXML, and — this is the part I'm most excited about — lets you 
extract individual instrument parts after translation, in both braille 
and printed PDF (if you choose the Lilypond option).

In practice, that means: if you write a full ensemble score in braille 
following BANA conventions, DottedNotes can now give you back correctly 
formatted braille and print parts, ready to hand to your other 
musicians. As far as I know, that's a genuinely new capability in this 
space — most existing tools treat braille as something you convert to 
print, not something you can start from and get usable parts back out 
of.

The error checking is the part I think matters most. DottedNotes now 
flags exactly which part and measure has a problem, and tells you what 
BANA rule it broke, so you can fix your own score without needing a 
sighted proofreader or an expensive transcriber to catch the mistake. 
For example, here's a real error message it produces:

Conversion failed. Error details: Instrument 'Flute': Measure 33: 
triplet group left incomplete at a bar line: 16 of 24 ticks accumulated. 
A triplet group's notes must complete within a single measure — a 
doubled-sign block may continue with a fresh group in the next measure, 
but one group cannot itself span a bar line.

So instead of a wrong or garbled export, you get told precisely where 
the problem is and why, in terms that map back to the BANA rule you can 
go check.

DottedNotes is still actively developing, and I'm one person building 
this, so if you try it and hit something confusing, broken, or missing, 
I'd genuinely appreciate hearing about it — that feedback is what makes 
it better. It's also open source, so if you or someone you know codes, 
contributions are welcome.

You can try it at www.dottednotes.net.

Thanks for reading, and I'd love to hear what you think — or what you're 
working on that this might help with.