Shakobox

by Jacqueline Landman Gay
HyperActive Software

Download the Shakobox notation stack for Macintosh

Download Shakobox for Windows

Shakobox provides a way for MetaCard and LiveCode to play scripted musical notation, which in some cases can bypass the need to embed sound files in a stack. Because the notation is scripted, handlers can provide long instrumental selections with virtually no size overhead. Stacks can be created to act as music editors that allow notation entry in fields for playback "on the fly." For simple music or sound effects, scripted notation provides a viable alternative to sound files, and greatly reduces the size of stack files on disk. Shakobox supports all 128 instruments in the QuickTime's MIDI instrument library, which allows a wide variety of sound effects and exceptional musical color.

Ingeniously written by Jon Bettencourt, Shakobox works by launching a small, proprietary application that serves as an interface between the stack scripts and the Macintosh QuickTime engine. On a Macintosh, the PlayCommand Agent application receives AppleScript commands from the stack, interprets them, and forwards the correct syntax to QuickTime. For Windows users, the Windows version of PlayCommand Agent allows communication with Shakobox either through the command line, or via small text files written to a folder.

The Shakobox stack itself contains all the documentation, scripts, examples, and AppleScript support you need to get started scripting musical notation in your stacks. It also contains scripts that will install either the 68K or OS X version of the PlayCommand Agent application, which is contained within the stack itself as a set of custom resources. If you plan to distribute your musical stacks, you can use the included installer scripts to make sure that your users also have this required application installed. Windows users should download the .zip file instead, which does not contain an installer stack but does come with a text file explaining instructions for use.

Shakobox for Mac will work with MacOS 8, 9 or X. Shakobox for Windows works with any version of Windows from Win95 to XP. QuickTime, and either LiveCode or MetaCard are required for either platform. Shakobox's PlayCommand Agent was written by and is Copyright 2002 by Jon Bettencourt. Shakobox stack design, scripting, and documentation is by HyperActive Software.