&gt;What are you gonna do about it?<p>Suggest you look at abc2MIDI, which has been around since 2002:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;abc.sourceforge.net&#x2F;abcMIDI&#x2F;original&#x2F;README.txt" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;abc.sourceforge.net&#x2F;abcMIDI&#x2F;original&#x2F;README.txt</a><p>&gt;There are large communities around cli tools for music,<p>Actually there aren&#x27;t. The biggest community is around Max, with PD a close second, and both are dataflow languages, not clis, although they have code affordances.<p>Most musicians don&#x27;t get on with cli&#x27;s at all. (I know this because I&#x27;ve sometimes tried to teach them.) Judging by mailing list volumes, actual volunteer user numbers - i.e. excluding students who have to learn them on courses before giving them up - are in the hundreds of users for each of the most popular clis, as a world wide total.<p>Trackers are a lot more popular - but they&#x27;re a different subculture.<p>In any case, ALDA is barely a cli for music - it&#x27;s a very simple ASCII music specification with a bare bones GM runtime, and it has some important features missing. (n-tuplets or chord symbols or key signatures?)<p>For a non-trivial cli look at Common Music, Csound, SuperCollider, Overtone (which runs on Clojure), ChucK, Impromptu, or even Sonic Pi, all of which do quite a bit more.