Choon Player

Choon Player is a simple audio player that supports loops and slowing down music for learning by ear. It was developed for learning Irish Traditional music. The plugin also supports the display of ABC notation as standard music notation by including Paul Rosen’s ABCJS library. That plugin has many more features than this software but was overkill for what I wanted!

The supported shortcodes are:

1. A player for MP3 files. To display the player, put a valid URL pointing to an MP3 or M4A recording between the shortcodes [choon] and [/choon] on your page or post.

2. You can display the musical notation derived from ABC notation combined with a player. Put valid ABC notation between the shortcodes [choon-abcjs-player] and [/choon-abcjs-player] on your page or post.

3. To simply produce sheet music, put a valid ABC notation string between the shortcodes [choon-abcjs-music] and [/choon-abcjs-music] on your page or post.

4. If you want a simple ABC editor on your WordPress page then including the tags [choon-abcjs-editor] and [/choon-abcjs-editor] will draw a ‘textarea’ on the page where you can input ABC notation.

Upcoming Changes

Previous versions of this code supported shortcode tags of [abcjs-tools-player], [abcjs-tools-music] and [abcjs-tools-editor]. These were retained for backwards compatibility but have been superceded by options 2, 3 and 4 above. Use the new codes!

This package currently supports the shortcode [choon-abc] and [/choon-abc] for playing ABC notation. This option is based on an library called ‘musical.js’. This is still included in this release – you should replace any current use with [choon-abcjs-player].

NOTE: This is the last release that will support the [choon-abc], [abcjs-tools-player], [abcjs-tools-music] and [abcjs-tools-editor] shortcodes.

Where can this be used?

Anywhere that shortcodes are accepted. Tested on pages and posts but
not on widgets (using the Twenty Twenty-Three theme). Some CSS adjustment likely needed with other themes.

How does it work?

The plugin includes the Choon Player JavaScript library. The URL or ABC notation that is put in the shortcode is passed to the relevant library, which places the player on the page instead of the shortcode.

See https://session.lpnz.org/choon-player-overview/ for usage examples.

What can be put in the url that is placed in the [choon] shortcode?

A URL pointer to an MP3 file. Other audio formats supported by the HTML5 audio player should also work.

What can be put in the block of text that is placed in the [choon-abc] and [choon-abcjs-*] shortcodes?

A block of valid ABC text. See https://thesession.org for examples.

See https://abcnotation.com/wiki/abc:standard:v2.2 for a more a comprehensive description of the ABC format.

What parameters may be used?

At this stage, none!

Thanks

Special thanks to Paul Rosen for all his work on abcjs. The WordPress plugin parts of this code were based on his excellent ABC Notation plugin. Any bugs or features are all my own work!

The javascript code for the [choon] player was based on the players used on the New Zealand Irish Sessions site.