Mup is a shareware program for printing music. It takes an input file containing ordinary (ASCII) text describing music, and produces PostScript output for printing the musical score described by the input. Arkka Enterprises was established to make Mup readily available at low cost to anyone who would like to use Mup.

A Mup input file can contains several kinds of sections or contexts. The description of musical notes is given in the "music" context. There are contexts for defining page headers and footers. There are also several contexts used for setting various parameters. For example, there is a "score" context in which global aspects are listed, such as the number of staffs, the time signature, page margins, etc. It is also possible to set parameters for individual staffs and even individual voices. (Each staff can have up to three independent voices.) Any parameter that can be set for an individual voice can also be set for a staff, and any parameter that can be set for a staff can be set for the score as a whole. The actual value used for a given parameter is obtained by searching from the most specific (i.e., voice), to the most general (i.e., score) until a value is found. All values are given a default at the score level, so that everything will always resolve to some value.

Mup's features include:

• 
  Up to 40 staffs, which can include 1-line, 5-line, and tablature staffs.
  Output can be restricted to any subset of the staffs.
  Different staffs can be different sizes.
  
• 
  Up to 3 independent voices per staff, up to 70 simultaneous notes per voice.
  
• 
  Double whole to 256th notes, with any number of dots.
  Tuplets.
  
• 
  Note styles of normal, grace, cue, X, diamond, plus shaped notes.
  Optional parentheses around notes and/or accidentals.
  
• 
  Time signatures of cut, common, or numerators from 1 to 99
  and denominators from 1 to 64.
  
• 
  All standard clefs, including treble, treble8, 8treble, French violin,
  soprano, mezzosoprano, alto, tenor, baritone, and bass,
  as well as the drum (neutral) clef.
  Clefs can be changed in the middle of measures.
  
• 
  Barline styles of single, double, dashed, dotted, end, repeats, or none.
  
• 
  8th note and shorter notes can have either flags or beams; beams
  can be cross-staff.
  
• 
  Guitar grids
  
• 
  Lyrics can be placed above, below, or between staffs.
  Unlimited number of verses, with control of font and size.
  
• 
  Headers and footers.
  
• 
  Staffs can be grouped with braces or brackets.
  
• 
  Automatic transposition of music and chord marks per staff.
  
• 
  First and subsequent endings.
  
• 
  Optional rehearsal marks and/or automatic measure numbering.
  Rehearsal marks can be boxed, circled, or plain.
  
• 
  Crescendo/decrescendo marks.
  
• 
  Rolls, ornaments, fermatas, accents.
  
• 
  Measure repeats.
  
• 
  Ties, slurs, phrase marks, octave marks, piano pedal marks, etc.
  Ties, slurs, and phrase marks can be solid, dotted, or dashed.
  
• 
  Suport for figured bass, analysis, and chords.
  
• 
  Optional MIDI file output.
  
• 
  PostScript output for printing on any PostScript compatible output device.
  Can be used with
  Ghostscript.
  
• 
  All standard PostScript fonts supported, in 1 to 100 point size,
  including most common non-English characters.
  
• 
  Input is a text file, for easy portability between computer systems.
  
• 
  Macros and 'include' files.
  
• 
  Mup will determine how to lay out the music, but there are
  numerous user controls available to fine-tune the output to meet your
  specific needs.
  
• 
  Comprehensive User's Guide provided in both
  PostScript and
  HTML formats,
  including many examples.