noding music (thing)

Everything2 is designed for noding text. If you're good with ASCII art, you can even node pictures. But how do you node music? Not song lyrics, but the actual music?

Well, you have a few options. These approaches have been attempted on E2, each with their own plusses and minuses:

• Music notation and guitar tablature: standard sheet music rendered as ASCII art. If you know how to read music, you can "hear" the music right from the node with no extra training, although you may have to squint a bit.

• e2midi: awkward to read on the screen, but very compact, although you can only write/hear one note at a time (no chords). Requires you to compile a GNU MIDI playback program to hear it.

• LilyPond: the name of the language and the program, it lets you write music of unlimited complexity in ASCII which the program can convert into sheet music and/or MIDI audio. Easier to read than e2midi, not so easy to understand unless you already read sheet music and have familiarized yourself with the language.

• Napster: give the reader a band and song title and tell them to go download an MP3 of it themselves. Time-consuming and unreliable, but certainly the easiest way to go.