Re: [abcusers] MacMIDI2abc
Phil Taylor wrote: I don't think most users appreciate the difficulty of the task of getting notatable music out of MIDI files. The MIDI format was designed to hold music to be _played_, and basically consists of a list of pitches and times. There is space for tempo, key, and a flag for major/minor (but no other modes), but even these fields are often left empty. If a MIDI notation program is to put in barlines, a real key signature, notate repeats etc. then those things all have to be figured out starting from the bare list of pitches and times. FYI time signatures are included in the Midi standard. And you can tell midi2abc to extract time sig. from the file. Unfortunately this is one of the options that doesn't work yet non the new macmidi2abc port. (Come to think of it, I never got it to work with the *old* macmidi2abc either - is there a bug in the midi2abc code - or is it the porting that's the problem?) Under the circumstances, I think James is to be congratulated on how well abc2midi actually does. After all, it's still a lot easier to edit the output of abc2midi than it is to listen to the tune and write the abc yourself from scratch. That's right. And midi2abc fares very well compared to other (commercial) midi converters I've come across. Manually recorded midis will always be a problem. Not even Al Jackson manages to keep an absolutely mathematicalloy correct beat. Most of the other problems with the midi2abc could be solved very easily by postprocessing the abc if somebody could come up with one or more of these scripts (which ought to be really useful for other ABC processing works too): 1. A rebarring script 2. A script for halving and doubling the note values. 3. A script for identifying written out repeats and replace them with repeat signs. 4. A script for removing superfluous accidentals. 5. A script for converting accidentals to key signature. 6. A script for resolving awkward uses of and , e.g. changing |G3/2ABc/2| into |GA Bc| 7. A script for regrouping eight notes etc. but maybe I'm asking for too much here. I feel I really ought to learn perl myself, rather than skaing others for scripts, but I just haven't got time. I have to ABC the rest of O'Neill's 1001 and then there's Lindeman's Norwegian trad. music book, and van Eyck and Praetorius and the Bach chorals and Vivaldi's concertos and Frank Nordberg To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] O'Neill errors
Phil Taylor wrote: First, let me say how much I appreciate your good work here Frank. It's really nice to have these tunes entered accurately and in a consistent style. [blushing] 1. Slurs around grace notes. Yes. Gracenotes may be slurred to the following note (most classical examples), to the previous note (slow airs and vocal music) or not at all (pipe music), and all programs really should recognise this. Right. Although I don't belive this is of any significance for the O'Neill tunes, it certainly is for other kinds of music! The trouble here is that nobody has yet come up with a way of dealing both with nested slurs and with slurs between chords. I see. Pity. (I also seem to remember that some ABC programs confuse slurs with ties, making things like |CD(EF- FG)AB| impossible, but when I just checked, BarFly, abc2ps and yaps did that OK.) I think all the up to date programs get this right now. Seems so :) 2. Ornament macros. If you use the same set of macros throughout, you could put them at the top of the file before the first tune. I don't, but it's worth keeping in mind in any case. That would probably cause fewer problems for programs which don't understand them. Even so, ABC programs aren't supposed to have problems with unknown header fields. That being said, it seems that the actual output from abc2midi is unaffected. It's just those "friendly warnings" that program gives again. I wish it could at least give an "unknown header" warning, rather than an error for each and every character in the m: field. 3. Faulty upbeats on repeats. This is a very common problem. If you are making an urtext version you simply have to follow the book. It's very tempting though, to put in a forward repeat or [1 [2 ending here and there to make it play properly. It is, and I've realized I'll have to add a critical edition as well as the urtext. 4. The abc2midi repeat bug. X:1 T:Example 1 M:C L:1/4 K:C C2DE|FGAB|c2BA|GFED:| X:2 T:Example 2 M:C L:1/4 K:C |:C2DE|FGAB|c2BA|GFED:| There are far more examples of ex. 1 out there than ex. 2, so programs really ought to be able to deal with it. Yes. It's dangerous to speak about "right" and "wrong" notation, but ex. 1 is certainly the common way to notate such things. 5. abc2midi "new notation" error messages. A problem with abc2midi is that it doesn't distinguish clearly between minor warnings like this and more serious errors. Right. It's easy to panic when you see an error log two miles long. 13. Typos. I've been using the new key analyse routine to check the key signature assignments. I've done about 300 tunes so far, and found about 25 where BarFly differs in opinion. I'll send you the list when I'm done. Thanks! That'll be really valuable. In particular though I have doubts about the tunes you have entered as Lydian mode. I know that's quite common in Scandinavia, but it's rarer than hen's teeth in Ireland. I started off just looking at the last note and the key signature to define the mode. Took a while before I figured out that that wasn't a good way of doing it. A problem with the O'Neill tunes is that many of them doesn't seem to have a clearly defined tonal centre at all. Frank Nordberg To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
[abcusers] ABC finder from jc
Wouw! I just tried it for the first time - impressed! I would like to introduce it for my music-friends, which raises this question: They are (mostly) Windows-users, and know generally far more about music than about computers. If you click the "M" link, you get a reference to af file with extension .midi, which most standard Windows-setup won't recognize. (Windows normally recognize filetype .mid) One solution would be to teach all Windows-users how to make Windows recognize .midi as a midi-file - My question is: Would it be possible for you to simply return a .mid file (maybe if the user clikced a checkbox claiming, that she is a Windows-user) - Søren To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
