I'm working on an algorithmic composition program, and I'm using Lilypond to generate the scores. There is the very real possibility of getting very short rhythmic durations (such as 128ths, 256ths, 512ths, etc). It appears that lilypond cannot handle these; I get an error saying "warning: flag `u7' not found".
I know that scores that include rhythmic durations such as these won't be particularly playable, but I'd like to still be able to generate something for the score; after all, something is better than nothing. My first thought is to replace these extremely short notes with grace notes, since that's essentially what they are anyway. However, the grace note Lilypond documentation[1] states that grace notes take up no logical time, and I want these notes to still take up the appropriate duration, so that the bar lines are places correctly. Looking through the documentation, I'm seeing a couple possibilities for how to accomplish this:
- Scaling Durations[2]. This looks promising, although the grace notes take up no space, and scaling zero times some factor is still zero. So maybe not so promising :(. - Time Administration[3]. It looks like I could just update the measure position after each grace note. However, the documentation on this is pretty sparse and I don't fully understand how to use it.
Has anyone dealt with this issue before? Any recommendations?