"Musical MIDI Accompaniment" is an accompaniment generator -- it creates midi tracks for a soloist to perform over from a user supplied file containing chords and MMA directives.

MMA is very versatile and generates excellent tracks. It comes with an extensive user-extendable library with a variety of patterns for various popular rhythms, detailed user manuals, and several demo songs.

MMA is a command line driven program. It creates MIDI files which need a sequencer or MIDI file play program.

MMA is currently in BETA. We are looking for lots of help in debugging the program, creating songs for distribution, and new and improved library files.

There are lots of other generators like MMA. The most popular is "Band In A Box". The problem with many of these programs is that they lock you into a proprietary format, work only with limited computing platforms, or insist on a silly GUI which limits your choices. You might think that the lack of a GUI is limiting, but we've found that MMA's method gives you a great deal of flexibilty in setting volumes, patterns, etc.

The main MMA archive is really all you need. It includes:

• mma - the executable python script,
• modules - the various python modules needed to run MMA,
• lib - a set of standard library files which contain MMA
  patterns for different rhythms,
• songs - a few demo songs,

After downloading this file you need to unpack it (a directory consisting of "MMA" and the version number will be automatically created). The magical incantation:

tar xzf mma-bin*tar.gz

should work just fine. Then run the PYTHON script "install". This will create the needed system directories and install the the PYTHON modules and the standard MMA library. The script has been designed for Linux ... if you install this on a different OS, please let us know just what problems you had and what you ended up for solutions.