Use Cases

Owned by Andreas Wenger
Last updated: Oct 01, 2014

This page provides an overview over the goals of the Zong! project.

Roles

  • Musicians are instrumentalists, singers or conductors, both on an amateur or professional level.
  • Composers are composers, arrangers or other people which write or edit scores, like conductors or teachers.
  • Publishers want to share scores, work with a lot of files and multiple programs. For example, a webmaster of a music search engine or a teacher may be a publisher.
  • Developers are programmers, which want to improve the software or create their own software based on Zong!.

Use case descriptions

Musician

  1. View sheet music: A musician can view scores on any of this computer devices (PC, laptop, tablet, smartphone). He can scroll and zoom the pages, and he can change the page layout.
  2. Print sheet music: A musician can print the scores on paper and to PDF files.
  3. Listen to sheet music: A musician can listen to the playback of scores. He can change the instrument sounds, use soundbanks (like SoundFont) and store the playback to audio files (like MIDI, OGG or MP3).
  4. Import other sheet music: A musician can open MusicXML and MIDI files in Zong!, which were created in other music notation software.

Composer

  1. Edit sheet music: A composer can create scores from scratch or modify existing ones. He can use the keyboard, mouse and a MIDI keyboard to insert notes. He can change the layout of the page and insert texts and images.

Publisher

  1. Share sheet music: A publisher can share his work over the internet, so that his customers or students can easily open his sheets from their own computer within Zong!.
  2. Export sheet music: A publisher can save his scores in many different image and audio formats. The MusicXML export allows the musician to open his scores in other music notation programs. 
  3. Convert sheet music: A publisher can convert his scores between various formats. Batch processing is possible.

Developer

  1. Extend Zong!: Since the software is free and open source, any Java developer can extend Zong! or write plugins.
  2. Use Zong! components: A developer can integrate Zong! components in his own software, e.g. show a score viewer in his app or generate preview images of MusicXML files. Zong! provides well-documented components and example programs for making integration easy.

Non-functional requirements

Zong! runs on multiple devices:

  • On a PC or laptop, Zong! can be installed as a desktop application.
  • On an Android smartphone, Zong! can be installed as an app for viewing and playing scores.
  • On any device with connection to the internet, Zong! scores can be viewed and played back in the web browser (both rendering on the server-side (servlets) or client-side (JavaScript, Web Midi) is possible.

Progress

Zong! is still in an early state. Printing and listening to scores is already possible to some extent, but only for experienced developers. This page will be updated, when new features are available.