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Work · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Modest – musical harmony library for Lua

This is a project I've been building in my spare time over the past few months. It's a library that provides methods for working with musical harmony ‒ intervals, notes, chords. For example, it can parse almost any chord symbol (Fmaj7, CminMaj9, etc) and turn it into notes, or it can identify a chord from a given set of notes. I started this project with the idea of using formal grammar to parse chord symbols. I wanted to use it instead of a hand-written parser, which is the common approach among similar libraries. Lua caught my attention because of Lpeg, a Parsing Expression Grammar library…

Modest is a Lua library for working with musical harmony, including intervals, notes, and chords. It can parse chord symbols like Fmaj7 into their constituent notes and identify chords from given note sets. The library… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1

    Western music theory library in C. Contribute to thelowsunoverthemoon/mahler.c development by creating an account on GitHub.

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2
    Nada▲255

    Compose music with just your voice

    Jun 2026 · tunelab.id · its alternatives →

  3. 3
    LightNote▲242

    An interactive site to learn the basics of music theory 🎶

    2016 · lightnote.co · its alternatives →

  4. 4
    muted.io▲128

    Magical collection of tools to learn music & music theory

    2023 · muted.io · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Flat is intuitive music notation software for Mac, Windows, web, iOS & Android. Compose, collaborate, play & print sheet music from any device.

    2016 · flat.io · its alternatives →

  6. 6ÆW

    Hi HN I’m building ÆTHRA — a programming language designed specifically for composing music and emotional soundscapes. Instead of focusing on general-purpose programming, ÆTHRA is a pure DSL where code directly represents musical intent: tempo, mood, chords, progression, dynamics, and instruments. The goal is to make music composition feel closer to writing a story or emotion, rather than manipulating low-level audio APIs. Key ideas: - Text-based music composition - Chords and progressions as first-class concepts - Time, tempo, and structure handled by the language - Designed for ambient,…

    Jan 2026 · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    This is a keyboard in just intonation. It can play the notes a piano can. The big difference from a piano is that all the notes become consonant. At least, when you want to play a dissonant chord, you are clearly opting in to it because it's clear which notes are dissonant to each other. You won't bump into a dissonant note by mistake. You can play without knowing any music theory. Hit arbitrary notes with the rhythm you want, and the pitches will work. Not understanding the buttons is fine. Even rolling your elbow around your keyboard is fine. If you are a musician and press the wrong key…

    2023 · ad8e.pages.dev · its alternatives →

  8. 8FA

    Hi all, I've spent some time working on music demixing or music source separation algorithms, which take in a mixed song and output estimates of isolated components (e.g. vocals, drums, bass, other). I took a popular PyTorch model with good performance (Open-Unmix, UMX-L weights), reimplemented the inference steps in C++, and compiled it to WebAssembly for a free client-side music demixer.

    2023 · sevag.xyz · its alternatives →

  9. 9SM
  10. 10

    I designed a relative piano-roll-based music notation. I used 12 colored arranged in a specific way to make visible the main effects and oppositions of Western tonal harmony. The tonic is always white, so a manual annotation/interpretation is required for each MIDI file. All chords are flags of three to four colors. Minor mode is darker, major mode is lighter. Colors are arranged in thirds. I sorted the pieces from simple complex harmony. I also wrote a bit of text to explain what you may see. There's also a corpus of structures: hyperlinks of tags that allow you to find similar…

    Nov 2025 · rawl.rocks · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    A lightweight music player for SoundCloud, Spotify and more

    2017 · its alternatives →

  12. 12AP

    I'm building a video conferencing app designed to facilitate better remote piano lessons. My hope is to solve a lot of the challenges piano tutors and new students deal with when taking lessons through Skype/Zoom. It leverages WebRTC's data transmission to send media, MIDI state, and (eventually) send sheet music files and other musical data. I'm surprised with how well the MVP has worked and would love to hear any feedback or suggestions!

    2024 · keyboardconnect.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13SA

    As an enthusiast of Indian classical music, I needed to write music notations in the traditional typeset format. When I didn't find any existing editors, I developed a Swara Notebook, a mobile focused web app to write North Indian Classical (Hindustani) music notations. The notes (called Sargam, similar to Solfege) can be written in English, Devnagri and Bangla scripts. The transcribed song can be played back in 6 different rhythmic cycles (Taal) to the accompaniment of the Tabla(a type of drum) or a metronome. Here's an example of a transcribed song…

    2023 · swaranotebook.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14
    Harmony▲193

    Lightweight music player for SoundCloud, Spotify and more

    2016 · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    A minimal text-editor with lua scripting. Contribute to skx/kilua development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2016 · github.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    This started out when I vibe-coded a guitar scale fingering generator. It came out pretty good, and I started adding stuff to it: chords, then how chords and scales interact. Then I added charts for other instruments I mess around with: piano, cello, alto recorder. There's a complexity toggle to go from basic harmony to extended/experimental stuff. It's honestly still mostly a toy, but I thought other people might be interested in playing with it. Source is on github, so it's easy enough to run locally and fork. https://github.com/aleshh/gtr-scales

    May 2026 · projects.alesh.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Harmopark is a browser-based music tool that can be used for different purposes, ranging from visually grasping harmony concepts to playing around with chord progressions.

    2019 · harmopark.app · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Hi HN, clx is an ahead-of-time compiler for standard Lua that generates C++20 and produces standalone native executables through GCC, Clang or MSVC. The project started as an experiment to see whether modern C++ could be used as a portable compiler backend instead of LLVM or direct machine code generation. The generated code is then compiled and optimized by the host toolchain. The latest release replaces the previous NaN-tagged value representation with a new shadow-types implementation, adds full int64 support, improves native arithmetic code generation and adds ARM64 macOS coroutine…

    Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    CLAVIER-36 is a programming environment for generative music. Programs are laid out in a two-dimensional grid, and evolve over time according to a fixed set of rules. The system is much like a cellular automaton, in that most of the rules governing the evolution of the system are local. C36 programs describe sequences of discrete events in time. The environment includes a primitive sampler, as a self-contained means of interpreting these events as sound. For full expressivity, though, the system is best used as a generator of data for interpretation by an external musical instrument, such as…

    2025 · clavier36.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20SH

    I made a software library for displaying piano music 7 years back, and recently ported it to the web (which is now easier than even ever). It displays sheet music as you play, and let's you take snapshots of specific chords, then keeps a running list of chords as keyboard visuals (instead of just displaying sheet music). Just a simple tool for songwriting/ figuring out songs by ear, or just understanding music key theory (which I'm admittedly a still a beginner at).

    2025 · pianoboi.site · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    This is part of my journey on pybind11. I wrote a tiny FM Synthesis library in C++ and a Python wrapper for that using pybind11. There is a command-line piano app in the examples directory if you want to play with it. Here is the link: https://github.com/charstorm/koelsynth/tree/main/examples/si... My next target is to attach this to some kind of physics simulation - like a bunch of balls moving around in a box with some internal walls. When the ball hits certain trigger points, it produces the sound.

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Chromaprint/AcoustID audio fingerprinting for the JVM - mgdigital/Chromaprint.scala

    2019 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Wrote this to learn more about the `chumsky` parser combinator library, rustyline, and the `ariadne` error reporting crate. Such a nice DX combo for writing new languages. Still a work in progress, but I thought I'd share :)

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Compose by intuition: A text DSL with smart editor support.

    May 2026 · ch3graph.com · its alternatives →

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