MIDI has short messages that requires a translator for storing information into the format or an extreme familiarity with the signals and bits. It does not hold quarter notes/beats but rather ppq or parts per quarter note in ticks. It is complex. I cannot write MIDI on pen and paper and understand it later without a very large table of what each byte does. HexNoteG9 requires a much smaller table, and it is human readable, 9-f being notes.

LilyPond as well as ABC notation cannot be stored in an int array, which makes moving things back and forth more difficult.

GUIDO looks cool and looks similar to an earlier format I tried using strings to store data. It looks fully featured, but it is not hex.

MusicXML takes a bunch of time writing tags. If I were to write it out by hand, it would require more tags and more lines than hex.

RTTTL : I'm not sure how to do dotted quarter notes, tied 8th to a dotted triplet. It seems similar to a text2Midi solution I created earlier, except my solution accounts for those edge cases.

I took your suggestion on getting started and put it into a github readme: https://github.com/fornof/hexNoteG9/blob/master/README.md

Guess next question is: what's the motivation for it? Where do you see use cases for it that currently use ad-hoc formats or badly-fitting ones?

As a musician and a programmer, I'm looking for ways to produce music without a staff on paper or in a text message, and produce music programatically with easy I/O to a synthesizer or to other functions in code. ABC notation comes close to what I want - it can be done in a text message, but I/O requires parsing and storing into objects to do anything with it. basic HexnoteG9 can be read in as little as 1 case statement viewing the last place.

I used LMMS and have taken a look at AbletonLive - both require heavy use of the mouse to get anything setup for music generation. My plan is to start at the bottom of the stack - sending notes through hex , and build on that so an artist could go in and edit the hex notes if they really wanted to, that it would be more readable than midi, and then the changes would show up in the layer above the hexnotes with buttons, sliders, a staff, and general UI.

maybe of interest -- https://vimeo.com/22798433