My install of antescofo is unable to read any score text file, even those which were previously working well. Now loading simple score files produces Max error message: “antescofo~: syntax error, unexpected NOTE” ! Even examples score text files in ircam-antsscofo Package folder are all producing errors.
This behaviour seems to have begun suddenly and may follow attempt to use “Build Collective / Application” command in Max 7 (?). Could that be related?
Thanks in advance.
Fergal
Hello Fergal,
Are you observing these errors with a Standalone/Collective Max Patch build? It’s been a while but the last time I made a collective with Antescofo I remember I had to setup some parameters in the standalone object that was embedded in the patch so that it would find files in the path… . A Standalone/Collective won’t have the same behavior as a regular patch due (for example) to search paths which are different.
I just tested the raw patch and it seems to be working fine. Another question which might help: Is your Antescofo package on a different Volume on your machine?
Cheers,
Arshia
Hi Arisha,
Thanks for your quick reply. Actually, I am still working within the original Max patch, not the standalone. The antescofo package is on a different volume to the patch and score files. But it was working fine until a few hours ago (on a different volume). It doesn’t seem to be a path-related issue. The error messages refer to syntax errors, even returning errors for simple actions (e.g. “NOTE G#4 ¼”).
The included tutorial file “0-BasicActions.asco.txt”, for example, is producing these errors:
antescofo~: syntax error, unexpected not, expecting
antescofo~: line 11, characters 54-55 in file ‘/Volumes/Data/fdowling/max_dev_06b/0-BasicActions.asco.txt’
antescofo~: syntax error, unexpected id, expecting {
antescofo~: line 13, characters 18-21 in file ‘/Volumes/Data/fdowling/max_dev_06b/0-BasicActions.asco.txt’
antescofo~: syntax error, unexpected ), expecting ::
antescofo~: line 30, characters 65-66 in file ‘/Volumes/Data/fdowling/max_dev_06b/0-BasicActions.asco.txt’
antescofo~: Abort loading score file ‘/Volumes/Data/fdowling/max_dev_06b/0-BasicActions.asco.txt’.
I will try loading the same files in a fresh install on a separate computer and will report.
Thanks,
Fergal
Hi Arisha,
But very strangely, I am getting the exact same error messages on a separate machine (recent install, only tested once, but previously working), even with the tutorial files. Could it be related to how text files is encoded?
Fergal
Fergal,
Looks like a text encoding issue as you noticed! Did you try checking the problematic text file encodings? I believe standard UTF should work fine and the bad ones should have old Lac ones. I will check as soon as I get access to Max.
Arshia
Hi Fergal.
Some encoding issues arise when you open the antescofo score file with some text editor that may change silently the “cariage returns” policy : The encoding is not the same between *nix/Mac and Windows (you can figure it out using the command line “od -c file.asco.txt | more” but the interpretation is rather technical).
Also some text editor (e.g. Wranglers) may change some characters like quote or backquote or some sequence of characters like “1/4” (3 characters representing a rational number) into ¼ (only one character outside the ascii encoding which represents nothing for antescofo~) which seems to happen in the example in your first message (however this can be a side effect of the web interface of the forum).
Can you send us one of the faulty file ? If you send it by email, please zip the file before and attach the ziped file to the email to avoid the interference with the mail encoding system.
Jean-Louis.
Hi Arisha, Jean-Loius,
Thanks for the advice. It seems I had two related issues which may have been partially obscuring each other. One was a typo in a separate Macro definition file which, when loaded, seemed to interfere with ‘carriage returns’. I seem to have had a simultaneous issue with text file encoding – again manifesting with similar issue resulting from missing ‘carriage returns’. This may have been the issue which caused apparently ‘clean’ tutorial files from the distribution to not load – possibly caused by copying and pasting between different open files in different editors and resulting in mixed encodings (?).
I am now using Sublime with uniform encoding of textiles, which seems to have sorted that issue. Syntax highlighting in Sublime/Antescofo language package helped identify the first issue.
Thanks for your help,
Fergal