What is the LenMus project?
Who is financing this project?
What is the history of the project?
It is my hobby!. LenMus aims at providing a free suite of integrated products to satisfy the needs of music students and teachers. It aims at becoming fully cross-platform and to offer, also, a good tool to write interactive texts on music (eBooks), with an embedded integrated music score editor.
I am doing this to learn, to help others, and for fun. It is not my objective to get money with this. In fact, it cost me money!. I prefer to put my efforts at creating a community-based project, a place to experiment and to develop free software to help music students and teachers, and free knowledge about the problems and algorithms to deal with music representation in computers. Music presents very interesting challenges of different complexity, some of them very hard.
Me!. I do this in my spare time, of which I don't have a lot. And I intend to keep LenMus as a hobby. I don't expect anyone to pay for this: it's my hobby and I'm glad to it, to learn, to help others with this project, and to have fun, thinking and programming.
It takes me a lot of time and I have to do (and to learn to do) all sort of tasks and to pay attention to all details.
I do incur in some costs, such as development software and hardware, domain name yearly registration and web hosting for the main site (not including download services and SVN repository hosting provided for free by SourceForge). And of course, my time. As LenMus is distributed as free software, I don't get paid for doing so, but getting money is not my objective.
LenMus began in November 2002, when I re-started my music studies. It was a small piece of software to draw a music staff with some random notes, as a help to practice music reading in different clefs. Little by little the software started getting bigger as I added new exercises to satisfy my needs as music student. Some colleagues were interested in the program and I started to give them a copy on CD. Soon I realized this distribution method had a lot of drawbacks. So by November 2003 I set up a website and started public activities.
On January 2004 I released LenMus 1.0, after having achieved three main objectives:
During spring 2004 I continued developing the program by adding more exercises, but I realized that program architecture was not good, as exercises were not integrated; version 1.0 was just a collection of independent exercises and the program could not grow in any other direction. So I devoted all summer to develop an architecture for integration between scores, interactive exercises and written text book material. The idea was to get all exercises and music scores fully integrated into the text. Music scores were not just images or pictures but fully interactive operational music scores that the student can hear, in whole or just the bars selected by the student. I also added polyphonic capabilities to support chords and scores with several instruments. On October 2004, I released LenMus Phonascus 2.0, based on the new architecture.
LenMus Phonascus 2.0 had technical limitations to grow more due to the programming language chosen, Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0, very good for rapid development but not so good to develop object oriented complex software. A second drawback was its limitation to run only on Microsoft Windows platforms: I was aiming to open the project to other platforms, specially the Linux and the Mac.
By that time, Microsoft announced the discontinuation of the VB programming language, without backwards compatibility, to promote its new .NET initiative, forcing VB developers to re-code all their programs. This could have been not complex, neither expensive, if Microsoft had not introduced incompatibilities (some of them gratuitous, such as only allowing zero based arrays). So, apart from forcing to re-coding your programs, Microsoft was forcing to review its logic! I must give many thanks to Microsoft for forcing me to move from VB and, of course, from Microsoft products: I wouldn't like to be forced again by Microsoft to dance at their will. Thanks to Microsoft I discovered the freedom of free software and open standards. Thanks Microsoft.
So in November 2004 I decided to abandon Microsoft insane dependency and re-code everything in C++. I started a market research to find suitable application frameworks that could help me in the multi-platform support objective and, finally I decided to use wxWidgets. The project was re-coded in C++ and I took the opportunity to re-design it with the idea of including an score editor. The first release of the new code base was launched in May 2006 (LenMus 3.0).
Since then, the project code has continue growing and evolving to include more functionalities.
By the way, I have still other VB programs impossible to maintain now. Microsoft kindness!
Last updated: 2022/01/14
LenMus