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Bol Processor

➡ This presentation is obsolete. Visit the Bol Processor project website! We only keep this page for links not yet transfered to the site.

Bol Processor 2 (BP2) is a program by Bernard Bel for music composition and improvisation with real-time MIDI, MIDI file, Csound, and text output options. BP2 produces music with a set of rules (a compositional grammar) or from text scores that can be typed in or captured from a MIDI instrument. These rule sets are very similar to the formal grammars (context-free, context-sensitive, etc.) that are used in computer science to define machine-readable languages. As a compositional tool, Bol Processor has been successful at modeling music of many styles including Western classical music, serial music, contemporary art music including minimalism, and Indian classical music. BP2 won the Bourges 1997 international award (ex aequo with Cecilia) in the category of computer-aided composition and realization software.

Bol Processor 2 began as a shareware application for Macintosh computers developed by Bernard Bel and Srikumar Karaikudi Subramanian. The original Bol Processor program had been developed in 1980 by Bernard Bel and Jim Kippen on an Apple IIc. In the Spring of 2006, BP2 was open-sourced with the hope that a community of developers will come together to port it to other platforms and continue to enhance BP2's facilities for music-making. Porting to Mac OS X was finished in June 2007 by Anthony Kozar.

➡ Versions of BP2 are available for both Mac OS X and Mac OS 7-9.

As an open source project hosted by Sourceforge, we are taking Bol Processor into the next stage of its evolution. We also hope that it will become more modular, separating its computational engines for musical grammars, polymetric expressions, and its powerful time-setting algorithms into software libraries that may be incorporated into other open source software.

➡ Download a PowerPoint slideshow introducing BP2 with sound examples (zip file, 150 Mb)
➡ YouTube video: “Bol Processor - 39 years!”

News

July 17, 2020: Towards a multiplatform Bol Processor

Bol Processor 2.9.8 had an eight-year existence requiring very few bug fixes, if any… However it needs to be entirely rebuilt to work under MacOS 10.15 (Catalina) and future versions: only 64-bit applications are allowed. The highest system version supporting BP9.2.8 is MacOS 10.14 (Mojave).

The entire graphic interface must be redesigned. To this effect, we opted for the development of a console server application receiving instructions via command lines. As per this writing, the new application is working, although a few important features such as real-time MIDI and graphics have not yet been implemented. We are delighted to announce that it compiled successfully for many systems including MacOS, Linux, Windows with both 32-bit and 64-bit Intel processors! This is a major step towards a multiplatform version.

The new application is under test with a graphic user interface programmed in PHP. This requires a web server on which to run but will allow anyone with a web browser to try out BP without installing anything. Ideally, once it is ready we will try to make a public BP server available online. Yet there will be opportunities to try out this new user interface sooner.

We invite software designers to join the team and contribute to the development of the core application and its client applications. Please join the BP users help forum and/or the BP developers list to stay in touch with work progress and discussions of related theoretical issues.

August 8, 2012: Bol Processor 2.9.8 released

The latest stable version of Bol Processor has been released! This version primarily fixes the problem that prevented graphical scores from displaying in the Graphics window on Intel Macs. BP 2.9.8 runs on Intel or PowerPC Macs with Mac OS X 10.4 or later. Read the release notes or download it below. For an introduction to the capabilities of BP2, please see Bol Processor introduction. For help using this release, see the help forum. For general discussion of BP2, check out the BP forum.

January 19, 2010: Bol Processor Universal Binary released

Bol Processor 2.9.7 beta has been released! This version of BP2 is a "Universal Binary" that will run natively on all Mac OS X computers, PowerPC or Intel-based. Several bugs have been fixed as well. This update makes it much easier for other developers to contribute to the project since we are now building BP2 with Apple's free Xcode tools. Read the release notes or download it below. For an introduction to the capabilities of BP2, please see Bol Processor introduction. For help using this release, see the help forum. For general discussion of BP2, check out the BP forum.

News archive...

Resources

Information and files

Bol Processor introduction (English)
Bol Processor introduction (français)
Poster on the Bol Processor project (20MB PDF file)
Latest features
BP2 documentation (not yet updated for Mac OS X)
Bol Processor project page on Sourceforge
All file releases for this project
Browse BP source code in the CVS repository

Forums and mailing lists

Software that works with BP2

For use on Mac OS X
- SimpleSynth - can playback BP2's MIDI output.
- MidiKeys - enter MIDI data with this onscreen piano keyboard.
- Csound - a powerful music and sound synthesizer without the limitations of MIDI.
For use on Mac OS 7-9
- Csound for Mac OS Classic - more information and downloads related to Csound
- Opcode's OMS - needed for MIDI playback on OS 9.
- OMS Software Development Kit (for developers) - needed to compile BP2 for OS 9.

Downloads

License

Bol Processor is available under the "new" BSD license.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Sourceforge.net for their awesome, free hosting services for open source software projects!

This page last modified on September 18, 2020.