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

[Leslie Hamric]

Hi Judith. How does this do with cello music? I played cello in a symphony and I'm looking for a faster way too get the parts translated into braille.
Leslie Hamric
Cello and Braille Music Teacher
Vice-President of National Federation of the Blind of Illinois At Large  Chapter


> On Jul 24, 2026, at 12:59 PM, Judith Lung via Perform-Talk <perform-talk at nfbnet.org> wrote:
> 
> 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.
> 
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