Music21 v. 1.8.0.
A new release of music21 focusing on Speed and Stability improvements.
Biggest improvement: Streams are now cached on disk after a parse. The first parse of a file will take the same amount of time as before (actually 10-15% slower), but after the first parse, subsequent parses will take 1/10th the time as before. This should be a great savings for software that parses the same files more than once (not necessarily in the same session). This speed improvement comes from two related improvements:
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Memory footprint of music21 is greatly reduced due to the use of Python slots on many frequently created objects that are rarely edited or expanded by users. (Thanks Josiah!)
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FreezeThaw works well to store or recall the current state of any stream on disk.
Moved from GoogleCode to GitHub (in case you hadn't noticed).
Improvements to Braille processing (Thanks to Mario Lang) and the Vexflow (thanks "Shimpe")
Better handling of local corpora and the Core corpus (and better docs).
Clearer documentation on how to contribute to music21. (Thanks Carol Willing)
Lilypond output now gets the version of lilypond directly.
BETA: work on automatic chord reduction is ongoing. Please let us know if you want to test anything.
Security improvements in a few places.
Added support for Vibraphone in instruments (thanks Chris Culy) and initial support for tablature six-line staves (thanks metalmike).
Lots of bug fixes and improvements (mainly Josiah's great work under the hood). Thanks also to the NEH, the Digging into Data Challenge, the Seaver Foundation, and MIT for support of the project.