Existing Shawzin tools

What already exists, what each does well, and where SHAWZIFY differs. This is also the credit list: several of these projects are why the format research in shawzin-format.md was possible.

The landscape

Almost every existing tool takes MIDI in. That is a reasonable place to stop — MIDI already contains discrete notes with pitches and times, so the remaining work is a lookup table plus timing. It also means the hard part is left to the user: finding or making a MIDI file that already fits a twelve-note instrument.

shawzinscore

The most complete piece of work in the ecosystem: a browser-based viewer, editor and player with a full model of every Shawzin variant, scale and chord voicing, plus validation of the game's own rules. It is where SHAWZIFY's understanding of the song-code structure, the scale tables and the format limits came from — and it is the reason those tables did not have to be reverse-engineered from scratch.

It is an editor, though. You bring the notes.

ShawzinBot

A .NET application that plays a MIDI file or a live MIDI device into Warframe by synthesising key presses. Its MIDI-note-to-position table is the source for SHAWZIFY's absolute pitch reference (Shawzin octave 1 = MIDI 48), and its default key bindings match the documented in-game controls.

Its mapping is a fixed dictionary: a note outside the table is either skipped or folded with note % 12, which does not preserve contour. SHAWZIFY's live layer does the same job — user-space SendInput, focus-gated — but plays an arrangement that was optimised first.

The MIDI-to-code converters

MIDI-To-Shawzin, Warframe-shawzin and similar tools parse a MIDI file and emit a song code. They differ mainly in how they pick a scale and what they do with unplayable notes. They are useful and they work; the input problem is the one they do not address.

What SHAWZIFY does differently

Audio in, not just MIDI. Stem separation, transcription and analysis, so the input is a song rather than a score.

Arrangement as constrained optimisation. Not "which key is this note" but "what should survive". Importance scoring, a scale/transposition search across all nine scales, Viterbi melody mapping that preserves contour, polyphony reduction by harmonic function, targeted density reduction, and conditional arpeggiation.

Honest measurement. The compatibility score is weighted by note importance and accounts for pitch error, timing shift, melody retention and harmony survival — not playable / total, which would rate a piece that happens to sit in C pentatonic at 100% no matter how badly it was arranged.

Explainability. Every changed note records what happened and why, and the UI surfaces it per note.

No truncation. Over-long songs are split at phrase boundaries into importable parts.

Licence and attribution

SHAWZIFY's encoder, decoder, instrument model and arrangement engine are written from scratch and released under the MIT licence.

• The MIT-licensed projects (shawzinscore, ShawzinBot) were the primary factual references for the song-code structure, the scale tables and the absolute pitch mapping. Their licence permits reuse with attribution; this file and shawzin-format.md are that attribution.
• The GPL-3.0 and AGPL-3.0 projects were read only to corroborate factual details of a game's file format. No code, data file or algorithm was taken from either. Facts about a format are not copyrightable, and none of SHAWZIFY is a derivative work of them.
• The WARFRAME Wiki (CC-BY-SA) supplied the scale list, controls table and note limits.

No game assets — audio, images or fonts — are included in this repository. The demo melody is original, written for this project.