timing (the 1.7 approach)

[Rune Zedeler]

What the heck, I think that now would be a good time to mention an idea 
I got a while ago. Afaics this would solve some of the mensural notation 
problems in a relatively clean way; and further more would make entering 
triplets a lot easier.
The idea is quite simply to allow durations to instead of being a tuplet 
  of dotcount and power-of-two to be a TRIPLET of dotcount, 
power-of-two and power-of-three.
This means that i.e. 12 would be a legal duration (because 12 can be 
written as a product of powers of two and three).
This way the different mensural modus could (afaics) be entered 
context-freely (that is: the music wouldn't depend of the 
time-signature), and when entering triplets one could substitute
c8 d8 \times 2/3 { e8. f16 g8 }
with
c8 d8 e12. f24 g12
Then the time signature would only have influence of how this was turned 
into notation and not on how the durations was to be interpreted.

Over time one should make an auto-tuplet-engraver automatically grouping 
triplet notes in approx. the same way as the auto-beam-engraver does, 
but for a start we could add grouping syntax, like
c8 d8 [[e12. f24 g12]]
to indicate where the tuplets go. - Or perhaps the new 
ligature-grouping-syntax (which I don't remember) could be used for this.

I know that strictly speaking, following this idea, any integer duration 
should be allowed (not just powers of 2 and 3) - but I think that 
storing the duration (2^n)*(3^m) as (n,m,0) would make things a lot 
easier to cope with - and for practical purposes I see no problems in 
sticking with the old times-syntax whenever one needs a non-triplet tuplet.

-Rune