Mup 7.1 for Mac OS X

Overview

Mup is a music publication program by Arkkra Enterprises. Music is described by a text file that you can create using your favorite editor or the included Mupmate program. Mup then determines how to lay out the music, and generates PostScript output for displaying or printing it, or a MIDI file for playing it.

See the included documents overview.html, mupfeat.html, and the Arkkra website for details.

Installation

The prebuilt version Mup available from Arkkra Enterprises has been built for x86_64. It can be compiled for other architectures, and should work back to at least OS-X 10.5

To install, double-click the MupMate-71.dmg disk image to get it mounted. You could then drag and drop the MupMate folder to a convenient place on your hard disk. The global folder /Applications or your personal folder ~/Applications would be a good place. If you are upgrading, be careful not to overwrite any files you might have stored in the folders MupIncludes or MupMusic.

Contents of the folder MupMate

• MupMate.app The double-clickable graphical user interface application for using Mup without the Unix command line. This application is self-contained. It contains its own copy of the mup command line tool and a copy of the Mup online documentation (accessible in the "Help" menu). MupMate is built on the cross-platform FLTK library. It runs in the native Mac OS X graphical environment, but does not look and behave like a real Mac OS X application; see the section on known issues below.
  MupMate relies on an external viewer application to display the generated Postscript files. Similarly, an external application is needed to play back generated MIDI files. The default configuration uses the Mac OS X command /usr/bin/open for both tasks, which, in turn, invokes the default applications for Postscript and MIDI files, respectively. On a stock Mac OS X installation these are the Preview application for Postscript files and the QuickTime Player application for MIDI files. Use the "Change All" button in the Finder's "Get Info" dialog to choose different default applications. Or you can enter different commands in the dialog Config --> File Locations" of the MupMate application.
• MupMusic This folder contains a couple of example text files in Mup music input format. The MupMate application is preconfigured to open files in this folder, but you are free to store your Mup input files wherever you like.
• MupIncludes This folder could be used to store Mup include files intended for use in multiple songs. The MupMate application is preconfigured to look into this folder, if a file mentioned in a include statement cannot be found next to the including song file.

Installation of Command Line Tools

(This is an optional step. It is not required to use the MupMate application.) If you want to invoke Mup directly from a Unix command line (e.g. the Terminal application), you can copy the commands from the folder optional_CmdLineTools/bin to /usr/local/bin or some other folder on your Unix command search path. The associated manual pages are available in optional_CmdLineTools/man/man1.

Known Issues

MupMate is a cross-platform application based on the FLTK library. It looks and behaves like FLTK applications on Linux and Windows platforms, not like a true Mac OS X application. For example, menus, keyboard shortcuts, and file dialogs are different.

If there are international characters in the path to the MupMate application, there may be cosmetic glitches with displaying and editing file paths in dialogs. Despite their garbled appearance, the paths should still work correctly.

If the Preview application fails to convert and display a generated Postscript file of typeset music, only a generic error message is shown.

Acknowledgements

For many years, the port to Mac was provided by Michael Thies at http://www.mthies.de/mup Additional hints were provided by Christoph Dalitz.

Arkkra Enterprises