lira

a piano roll written in c0

lira is a piano roll, a grid of pitches against time where a song is written by clicking notes onto it. it plays the song through oljud and saves it as a noter file. it is an ordinary ring-3 program. start lira.elf starts it in a window of its own, and so does a click on a song in hylla.

a moonshot screen with the shell on the left and lira on the right. lira shows a grid of dark rows named from d6 at the top down through the octaves, the song in the middle, with bar numbers 1, 2 and 3 along the top and lighter lines at every beat. amber bars mark the notes of gubben noak: three short c4 notes, then e4, three d4 notes and f4, and below them long c3 and g3 bass notes. a pale bar inside each note shows its velocity, shorter in the bass notes. a status line at the bottom reads 'demo.not 120 bpm note 4 steps vel 100 18 notes'. — the demo song, gubben noak, as lira opens it.

a first song

type start lira.elf mysong.not in the shell, then press alt-tab or click lira's window to give it the keyboard. rows are pitches and columns are steps, four to a beat and four beats to a bar. click a cell and a note goes in, click it again and it goes away. press space to hear the song and s to save, then type sync in the shell to keep it after a restart. without a file name lira edits song.not.

keys

click: puts a note in an empty cell, or takes away the note that is there.
1 2 3 4: the instrument new notes get, square, triangle, sawtooth or drum.
[ ]: halve or double the length new notes get.
, .: quieter or louder new notes.
- =: the tempo down or up.
arrows, page up, page down: scroll a semitone, a beat or an octave.
home: back to the start of the song.
space: plays the song from the start, or stops it.
l: loop on or off.
s: saves.
h: the help, this list over the grid.
escape: closes the help, or quits lira.

at most eight notes may sound at once. a click that would make a ninth is refused with a message in the status line.