How to make your own match files

[sildater]

Match files encode a note-wise alignment of a score and a performance.
To create one, you need:

• A score
• A performance
• An alignment*

*If you don't have an alignment, there are of course automated tools for this (which produce the occasional error). We have a library for this on PyPI or on github. In both links there are the same introductory code examples, the second of which should cover your use case. For automatic alignment to work well you need to check two things:

• the musical material you want to align has unique note Ids. If your musicxml file doesn't contain any Ids you can generate them via `pt.load_musicxml(..., force_ids=True)
• the musical material in both scores has to match roughly, that is, there aren't any large mismatches: full repeats not played, extra sections, an entire coda, etc. anything that stretches multiple measures can be a problem. If your musicxml contains repeats etc. you can "unfold" it to several different versions using partitura :

score_variants = pt.score.make_score_variants(part) # score variants only contains the structure of the variants, not full parts
part_versions_with_updated_ids = [pt.utils.update_note_ids_after_unfolding(score_variant.create_variant_part()) for score_variant in score_variants]

We also have a web-based tool to visualize and check your created alignments: https://sildater.github.io/parangonada/

With these three objects, we can now export

partitura.io.save_match(alignment, performance, score, "my_very_own_match.match")

Happy Matching!