A better way to specify notes? about beep

[dawidi]

Here's what I did with shell script wrappers around beep:
sound
This is just a slightly more elegant way to specify frequency,duration pairs - named after the SOUND command in BASIC.
spkplay
This interprets a music-oriented notation similar to the PLAY command in BASIC, setting the tempo, note lengths, octaves, staccato/legato playing styles, sharp/flat notes etc.
Like so:
spkplay t114 mn l16 o4 c d f d l8 a. a. l4 g ms l16 c d f d l8 g. g. f mn l16 e l8 d l16 c d f d l4 f l8 g e. l16 d l4 c l8 c l4 g l2 f

[ndim]

Thank you for that information.

Also, a quick remark on the command line argument checks:

if [[ "$@" == "" ]]; then

The "$@" expands to multiple arguments if the script is called with multiple arguments like script.bash foo bar bla, which results in the test expression being evaluated to be [[ "foo" "bar" "bla" == "" ]] which does not appear to be what you intended here.

Are you sure you did not want to check "$*" == "" here instead, or maybe even "$#" -lt 1?

[dawidi]

Indeed, "$#" -lt 1 would be better, that's what I meant to do. The "wrong" way still coincidentally does the right thing, but not for the right reason. Thanks!

[ndim]

The BSDs appears to have a kernel implementation reminding me of the IBM BASIC way of specifying notes, which the speaker(4) man page describes pretty well:

https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=speaker&sektion=4&manpath=FreeBSD+13.0-RELEASE+and+Ports
https://man.netbsd.org/speaker.4