James Allwright wrote a week or so ago: | For those who have wondered what got discussed by the abc standards | committee, here is a summary of our discussion. The section numbers | referred to can be found at | | http://abc.sourceforge.net/standard-propose/
Y'know, I've been wondering whether anything was happening with this. Then I found that I'd been dropped from abcusers, which explained why it was sorta quiet. But in looking around, I still get the feeling that not much has happened ... One things I see in the above file is no change at all for something that I and a few others have discussed on numerous occasions: | 3.7 First and second repeats | | 3.7.0.1 | First and second repeats can be generated with the symbols [1 | and [2, e.g. faf gfe|[1 dfe dBA:|[2 d2e dcB|]. When adjacent to | bar lines, these can be shortened to |1 and :|2, but with regard | to spaces | [1 is legal, | 1 is not. There's a real problem here that most abc tools still implement only the [1 and [2 cases, and forbid the use of 3rd and later endings. The above doesn't actually outlaw 3rd endings; of course; it merely gives two examples and leaves other endings to the reader's imagination. It's fairly obvious how to notate the usual endings, but there's still no part of the proposed abc standard that mentions or explicitly legalizes them. After several online discussions, I (and probably a few others) have implemented the rather trivial extension of allowing any string of digits, commas, hyphens and periods to label an ending. This means that endings like [1,3 and [1-3 work with a very few abc tools. If you use them in your tunes, my Tune Finder will handle them and return correct PS or GIF notation. It seems that this should be a rather trivial addition to most abc programs (though players would have a bigger problem of needing to actually understand the ending syntax in some minimal sense). It took me maybe half an hour to get this working in abc2ps, and now I can notate my Scandinavian musical endings correctly. This omission isn't surprising when you consider that ABC started off as a tool for British-Isles folk music. Thus, when I open my copy of O'Neill's 1850 at random, it takes a half dozen tries before I find a page with any first and second endings at all. You don't often need them in this tradition. But this is one of many examples of something that is required for other sorts of music. The impression that I get is that decades from now the abc "standard" will probably still include the above passage, and musicians will have to find other software because most abc tools are still so primitive that they can't even handle 3rd and 4th endings. I'd also observe that the term "repeat" in the above should be changed to "ending". Repeats are something different, indicated in abc with colons. Repeats and endings are inter-related, of course, since repeats tend to have different endings. Something I've also implemented is the conventional |:: ... ::| notation that says "three times through". This can be important at times, mostly if you are dealing with dance music. There are lots of traditions in which it's common to play phrases four times. When there aren't separate endings for the repeats, this is how the repeats are usually indicated. <chide> Maybe we could get something moving here. How many years has it been so far? </chide> -- Notice: This message is copyright by the sender, and was doubly encrypted by applying the ROT13 encryption algorithm twice. Unauthorized decryption of this message within the jurisdiction of US courts by anyone other than the intended recipient(s) is a violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, and in punishable by five years in jail, a $500,000 fine, or both. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
