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.

As an alternative to option 2 you can use a combination of the following two shortcodes.

1. A player for ABC notation. To display the player put ABC notation between the shortcodes [choon-abc] and [/choon-abc]. This option is based on an older now unsupported library called ‘musical.js’ which may have issues in future. This is still included for now – you may want to replace any current use with [choon-abcjs-player].

2. 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. You can use this option in combination with [choon-abc] to show music notation on the same page.

3. 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.

Previous versions of this code had shortcode tags of
[abcjs-tools-music], [abcjs-tools-player] and [abcjs-tools-editor].
These are retained for backwards compatibility but have been superceded by options 2, 4 and 5 above. Use the new codes!

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

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

A 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.