Welcome to the Music Processing Suite Website!

Music Processing Suite (MPS) is a software system for advanced symbolic music processing with the following features:

Music Modeling

MPS is based on music models containing individual representations of musical aspects and contexts such as meter, tempo, rhythms, pitches, scales, harmonies, loudness, lyrics and more.

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Music Analysis

Analysis infrastructure for statistical music analysis and visualization. MPS generates PDF reports containing statistical diagrams, tables, graphs and Markov models.

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Composition Language

Composition language for intuitive, redundancy-free music specification and notation. Easily create your own scores and lead sheets.

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Music Search

Advanced context-sensitive music search functionality

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Transformations

Transformation infrastructure for conversions between various music representation formats such as MPS Models, MIDI, MusicXML, LilyPond, PDF, CSV, SuperCollider and more.

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Powerful IDE

MPS is a powerful customizable application based on Eclipse

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News and Updates

Latest Posts

Release of Music Processing Suite 1.12.0

Music Processing Suite 1.12.0 was released on August 26, 2022.

Note: since version 1.11.0, MPS requires Java 17 to run. It is recommended to download a Java 17 JDK for your operating system from Zulu.

New Features and Enhancements:

  • Updated Eclipse base platform to version 2022-06

Bugfixes:

  • MusicXML Processing:
    • Fixed NullPointerException that occurred if MusicXML files did not contain an identification element
    • Fixed NullPointerException that occurred if MIDI instrument definitions did not contain certain elements such as midiProgram
    • Fixed an issue that resulted in incorrect context layer model representations if rests were modeled as chords

Release of Music Processing Suite 1.11.0

Music Processing Suite 1.11.0 was released on May 22, 2022.

Important note: MPS now requires Java 17 to run. It is recommended to download a Java 17 JDK for your operating system from Zulu.

New Features and Enhancements:

  • General:
    • Updated Eclipse base platform to version 2022-03
  • MusicXML Support:
    • MPS now supports MusicXML 4.0
    • MusicXML score export now includes chord symbols
    • Improved internal caching of instrument associations
  • Sentiment Analysis:
    • Sentences are now also divided at semicolons
    • Removed VADER sentiment analysis framework since CoreNLP provides much better results for lyrics
  • Music Analysis:
    • The analysis view is opened automatically if not already opened after music was analyzed
  • Miscellaneous Enhancements:
    • Automatic detection of external applications now includes the AppData/Local and AppData/Roaming folders on Windows
    • If an external application can not be located, additional details about searched paths is available in the displayed dialog
    • Composition files can now have the extensions *.mcl or *.mc2l
  • Documentation:
    • Updated documentation regarding Java requirements
    • Rhythm documentation was enhanced with an example containing tied notes and minor issues were fixed
    • Old keyword tonalCenter was consistently replaced with key

Bugfixes:

  • MusicXML:
    • MusicXML parser did not process bass notes of harmonies in all cases
    • Fixed a bug which caused wrong instrument associations of percussion instruments while loading MusicXML files
    • Simultanous percussion notes and percussion rests are now correctly placed in MPS streams
    • Fixed a “ripple effect” during instrument detection that caused instrument names to be considered similar depending on the sequence of instruments that were provided
    • Fixed NullPointerException if note head information is not present
    • MusicXML parser: poet was not read correctly
    • MusicXML export: composer was written to output instead of poet
  • Sentiment Analysis:
    • Fixed race condition when starting external CoreNLP server – first request sporadically resulted in java.net.ConnectException
    • Connections to CoreNLP servers are now always released even if the response cannot be parsed – in previous versions this could cause the client to block indefinitely
  • Miscellaneous Bugfixes:
    • Fixed spelling of Mandolin (it’s not Mandoline) on the UI and in LilyPond include file names that are required to generate fret board diagrams
    • Fixed a NullPointerException that happend while automatically searching external applications on Windows
    • CoreNLP could not be located automatically on Windows because MPS looked for the wrong JAR file name
    • Fixed java.lang.Error: SWT Resource was not properly disposed when closing the analysis view

Release of Music Processing Suite 1.10.1

Music Processing Suite 1.10.1 was released on January 28, 2022.

New Features and Enhancements:

  • Enhanced automatic software detection on various operating systems, especially MuseScore detection on Linux
  • Analysis View: Column widths of the table displaying the raw data are automatically adjusted to the optimal width whenever new data is displayed
  • Analysis Report PDFs containng aggregated plots (collection or corpus scope) use simplified harmonies for harmony-related plots (otherwise plots become much too confusing)

Bugfixes:

  • Enhanced environment configuration for LaTeX compiler runs in order to avoid frequent error message sh: tput: command not found and tput: No value for $TERM and no -T specified
  • Fixed incorrect path for LaTeX executables on Windows in documentation

Release of Music Processing Suite 1.10.0

Music Processing Suite 1.10.0 was released on January 12, 2022.

New Features and Enhancements:

  • Upgraded Eclipse platform to version 2021-12 (4.22)
  • Analysis enhancements:
    • Lyrics can now be analyzed even when distributed over multiple voices
  • Enhancements for analysis report PDFs:
    • Sentiment analysis plots now visualize durations of sentences with the corresponding start and end times
    • Sentences in sentiment analysis plots are numbered and listed below the plots
  • UI enhancements:
    • Multiple pieces can now be selected and analyzed simultaneously
    • There is now a preference to select the default score generation application (MuseScore or LilyPond)
  • Support for power chords when resolving harmonies
  • Internal enhancements, optimizations and dependency upgrades

Bugfixes:

  • Lyrics containing special characters like quotes and semicolons are now stored and loaded correctly in CSV files
  • Charts exported from the analysis view in MPS were flipped vertically. This has been fixed.
  • Fixed an issue which caused context harmonies to be chosen as key in generated scores
  • Fixed errors like java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: The value '6/4' is invalid. when loading fitness function configurations containing distributions for time signatures
  • Corrected JVM command line parameter for Java 16+

Latest Release

Latest MPS version: 1.12.0
Released on August 26, 2022

Music Processing Suite is developed by David Pace and originates from his dissertation project at the University of Music in Karlsruhe, Germany.