# The `.track` ecosystem

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**The music we make together.**

`.track` is a plain-text music format: songs, instruments, waves, motifs, and
tunings, all readable and editable in any text editor, synthesized live by
[`game-audio`](https://crates.io/crates/game-audio). Because the format is
text, every song is also source code — and that makes music shareable the way
code is shareable.

## The idea

One person designs an instrument set. Someone else writes a leitmotif with it.
A third person drops that motif into their game's soundtrack, transposed and
layered with their own sounds. Nobody asked permission, nobody exported stems,
nobody re-recorded anything — they just imported a file.

The format carries the pieces that make this work:

- **`@import`** pulls sounds, waves, motifs, and tunings from other files —
  local paths or URLs, like a package manager for music.
- **`# Meta`** (title, author, description, tags) keeps shared files
  identifiable as they travel.
- **Everything is text.** Diffs, merge requests, hand edits, and LLM edits all
  work on music the same way they work on code.
- **Runtime-ready.** Any game using `game-audio` plays the same file the
  editor saved — with live variation: switchable layers, parameters,
  transitions.

## The tools

| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
| [plainsong](https://gitlab.com/porky11/plainsong) | Keyboard-first editor: compose on a pitch×time sheet, design sounds, sing, export audio. Runs [in the browser](https://p11c.xyz/plainsong-web/). |
| [plainaudio](https://gitlab.com/porky11/plainaudio) | Music player for `.track`, MIDI, and standard audio formats. Opens shared links [in the browser](https://p11c.xyz/plainaudio/). |
| [trackyard](https://trackyard.p11c.xyz) | Registry to upload and find parts — no login, tagged, searchable, every entry playable and editable in one click. |

The three link into each other: trackyard entries open directly in plainaudio
(play) and plainsong (edit); both editors open any `.track` URL.

## Licensing

Shared parts on trackyard are CC0 — take them, change them, ship them.
The tools are MIT OR Apache-2.0. The point of the ecosystem is that nothing
in it locks you in: the format is documented, the parser is open source, and
your music is a text file you can read.
