October 19th, 2016

MDAL - First Public Beta

The Music Data Abstraction Language (MDAL) project has been taking up a lot of my time in the past two months, and after three days of hardcore bugfixing I finally advanced it to a point where I can show off a working beta. The whole thing is still at a very early stage though, so don’t expect to get much use out of it yet.

So what on earth is MDAL? Broadly speaking, MDAL is a different take on the subject of music markup languages such as MML or ABC. While the latter are closely related to traditional music notation, MDAL has it’s roots in tracker music. MDAL uses a notation that closely resembles module files, meaning it has a sequence-pattern-row structure.

The main objective for now is to provide a simpler alternative to hard-coding music in assembly for those 1-bit routines where XM conversion isn’t feasible. However, it may become useful for, uh, other things in the future… For the time being, only the BetaPhase engine is supported, though.