Google Summer of Code 2013 wrap up

This past week marked the end of Google Summer of Code 2013. Google announced over a thousand successful projects. It was the first year that MuseScore was selected and it turned out to be successful.

Midi import improvement

Andrey Tokarev, mentored by David Bolton did a very nice job. The import of MIDI files in the future MuseScore 2.0 will be hugely improved over version 1.3. To read all about it, visit Andrey's page in the developer handbook. Andrey also documented the new MIDI import interface in the user handbook.

MuseScore and Emscripten

Kyle Messner had the ambitious goal to port the core of MuseScore to Javascript using Emscripten. We knew it was a tough job, and Kyle did incredibly well. He doesn't have yet a way to display a score in the browser but he managed to parse a MuseScore file and extract some metadata. All in a browser! Read Kyle's wrap up report about his project.

Continuous translation

MuseScore was awarded with only two slots from Google, so we had to disappoint many of the students who requested to code on MuseScore during the summer. However one student didn't take a no for an answer, and decide to still spend his summertime on MuseScore. Manan Dang, a student from India implement continiuous translation for MuseScore. Read about the outcome of his project

Conclusion

All projects were very different, one very practical, the other very experimental and the last one lowering the adoption barrier. However it was a runaway success. All students passed big time. Good job guys and thank you! Thanks to David Bolton and Thomas Bonte for helping out mentoring and dealing with the administration.

My personal hope is that Kyle, Andrey and Manan will stick around. From our discussion on IRC, Kyle is really eager to have some notes displayed in the browser and Andrey wants to make the MIDI import event better by detecting voices and keep the MIDI timing in the score. Manan had a larger vision to create a full fledged resource manager in MuseScore. But whatever they decide to do in the future, I wish them all the best with their professional careers.

Thomas Bonte and I will represent MuseScore at the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit on October 19th and 20th and we are eager to share our experience with other open source organisations. We will be in the San Francisco Bay Area during a week between Oct. 16th and Oct. 24th, let us know if you want to meet.

Google Summer of Code is a great program and I hope MuseScore will be able to be a part of it next year. Thanks Google!