Re: [abcusers] abc2win and ! line breaks.
The standard can be set to say that !...! is a special symbol, and developers can programs to read files on that basis UNLESS the header contains abc2win in which case it is a line break! Someone tell me that life really could be that simple! It isn't. I really want mid-line ! linebreaks (they're far more important to me than anything I could achieve with !...! constructs) and I have been lobbying Phil for years to add them to BarFly, which doesn't put any creator info in its headers by default. This isn't a matter of supporting legacy tunes, it's about doing something mostly new (insofar as abc2win users don't seem to have yet exploited this possibility in their program the way I want to use it) AND IT CANNOT BE ACHIEVED BY ANY OTHER MEANS. Let's hope there are a lot more programs that can use them in future. Perhaps it might make it clearer why I'm being so insistent about this if I explain what most of my time using ABC is spent doing. I spend about a full day a week in the National Library of Scotland researching things, mostly tunes, which are copied in ABC using a geriatric Mac laptop that runs BarFly and pair of cheap walkman headphones. For the time I'm transcribing tunes, I'm working with rare sources that I can't afford to have photocopied; the process required by the library for old and delicate material involves intermediate microfilm, and usually leads to a fairly bad result anyway, where things like articulation marks often get lost. (The NLS's charges, which are among the lowest in Scotland for rare materials, are still high enough that if I wanted everything I transcribed to be on xerox first, I could easily incur a photocopy bill for a day's direct transcribing that was more than I paid for my laptop). So I've got no alternative but to get the most accurate transcription possible on the spot. The way BarFly works gives me a three-way check on accuracy: - does the structure make sense? - does it sound right? - does the score on the screen look exactly like what's on the page of the original in front of me? The first is dealt with by the columnar layout I use; I'm mostly doing things in four- and eight-bar phrases, and if something can't be laid out to look like that in ABC source form, chances are that something's gone wrong somewhere, either 250 years ago or in the previous five minutes. (BarFly also has error checking utilities which on average picks up one miskeying every eight bars; I'd find these manually anyway, but BarFly finds them quicker). The second is handled by BarFly's playback (helped by the ability to highlight the note being played - this means you can move instantly from a general feeling of something's not quite right in that phrase to typo on that note). The third is supported by BarFly's instant preview (no batch processing or invoking of GhostScript involved - GhostScript would be unusably big and slow on that laptop anyway). In this situation I don't have time to process the layout optimized to show the structure of the tune into some other form before showing it on the screen - and since I need to identify where any errors are in my source, what's on the screen has to be directly derived from it. So I *cannot* afford to have unnecessary built-in conflicts between source readability and screen readability. If I want a print-optimized version by adding graphical tweaks, I'll do it at home; the laptop is a lousy machine to use for them anyway. What it is *very* good for is interactivity, and it's the speed of switching between structure, sound, and score modes of perception that makes for accuracy. But supporting this is a rather fragile characteristic of a language, which many syntactic misfeatures could break, and people who haven't used it in such an interactive environment won't easily spot the important issues. - Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760 http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack * food intolerance data recipes, Mac logic fonts, Scots traditional music files, and my CD-ROM Embro, Embro. -- off-list mail to j-c rather than abc at this site, please -- To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] abc2win and ! line breaks.
Jack Campin writes: | Perhaps it might make it clearer why I'm being so insistent about | this if I explain what most of my time using ABC is spent doing. | I spend about a full day a week in the National Library of Scotland | researching things, mostly tunes, which are copied in ABC using a | geriatric Mac laptop that runs BarFly and pair of cheap walkman | headphones. | | For the time I'm transcribing tunes, I'm working with rare sources | that I can't afford to have photocopied; the process required by the | library for old and delicate material involves intermediate microfilm, | and usually leads to a fairly bad result anyway, where things like | articulation marks often get lost. (The NLS's charges, which are | among the lowest in Scotland for rare materials, are still high enough | that if I wanted everything I transcribed to be on xerox first, I could | easily incur a photocopy bill for a day's direct transcribing that was | more than I paid for my laptop). So have you (or they) considered using a digital camera instead? This is rapidly becoming a much more practical approach than microfilm. For an example, look at: http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/img/P7070088.JPG I took this photo with a handheld Olympus C-700. It's one of many cameras with a macro (;-) feature and can focus as close as about 10 cm. This photo was taken from about 25 cm. The weakness of the staff lines isn't a photo artifact; the original was that bad. In fact, the picture just might be slightly more readable than the original. Anyway, this was taken with the page lying flat in its binder, as you can probably see, and didn't require me or anything else touching the page. Bound pages would be a little bit trickier, since they'd have to be held flat. You'd probably want two people to handle that, if the pages are at all fragile. After taking the photo, I plugged the camera into a Mac Powerbook, iPhoto read it in, and I scp'd it over to my web server. This was a couple minutes' work. I'm not sure how much of this would work on a geriatric Mac, but it certainly works well with a newer Mac laptop. Some years back, I read an interesting SF short story, about Sherlock Holmes' last case. He was contracted by a local flying saucer nut to investigate the possibility of visiting aliens. Sherlock thought that if they were really here, and hadn't announced themselves, they were probably scholars studying our planet. So one good place to look for them would be the British Museum. He went there and watched the patrons. He noticed some of them taking photos of a number of books in the collection, without using flash. So he came back later with a light meter, and with a bit of research at camera dealers, determined that there were no cameras available that could take hand-held photos without flash under the museum's low-light conditions. This proved that they were using technology not available on Earth, so they had to be aliens. Case solved. This story might not work now. I did use flash for my photo, but I'm pretty sure there are digital cameras available (for a good price) that wouldn't have needed flash. But this does give you an idea of what a consumer-grade camera costing a few hundred dollars can do now. Just make sure it can do close focus, 20 cm or less. (I wonder if I could find the story. I don't recall who wrote it or what the title was. As the story continues, Sherlock is soon visited by one of the aliens, who learned of him because they were monitoring the saucer-nut organization, and thus learned that he had unmasked them. They wanted to hire him to look for other aliens, because they were having problems with unauthorized visitors to Earth, and needed someone who was good at spotting them ...) To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] abc2win and ! line breaks.
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], David Webber [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes The standard can be set to say that !...! is a special symbol, and developers can programs to read files on that basis UNLESS the header contains abc2win in which case it is a line break! Someone tell me that life really could be that simple! Please!! CLONK! Sorry David, no such luck. abc2Win only appears in the *file* footer, like so % Output from ABC2Win Version 2.1 k preview on 05/07/2003 not the individual *tune* headers within that file. So if a file is created and only ever edited in abc2Win and posted to the Net as a complete file, then that construct will be at the bottom of the file. A tune created in abc2Win and then copied into an email, or a tune extracted from a file by JC's tune finder, almost certainly *won't* have any evidence in it of creation in abc2Win. -- Steve Mansfield [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.lesession.co.uk - abc music notation tutorial, the uk.music.folk newsgroup FAQ, and other goodies To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] abc2win and ! line breaks.
From: Steve Mansfield [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sorry David, no such luck. abc2Win only appears in the *file* footer, like so... Ah well, I knew it couldn't *really* be so simple - but that is at least something - on can parse for abc2win and assume things if it is found, even if one can't assume anything if it is not :-( Dave David Webber Author of MOZART the music processor for Windows - http://www.mozart.co.uk Member of the North Cheshire Concert Band http://www.northcheshire.org.uk To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] abc2win and ! line breaks.
David Webber writes: | On Fri, 4 Jul 2003, John Chambers wrote: | BTW, a year or so back, I had my tune finder's search bot count the | tunes that seemed to come from abc2win (because of the ! chars, or | because they had a % ... abc2win comment). It came to between 9 and | 10% of the tunes. | | If | | 1. the above comment means that abc2win always writes its name in a | comment | | and | | 2. The files which use ! in the middle of a line as a line break are | almost all written by abc2win | | then this is very encouraging news! | | The standard can be set to say that !...! is a special symbol, and | developers can programs to read files on that basis UNLESS the | header contains abc2win in which case it is a line break! | | Someone tell me that life really could be that simple! | Please!! Um, sorry; it's not that simple. Abc2win does write its name in a comment, but in the worst possible way: It puts the comment at the end of the tune, after a blank line. Yes, it really is outside the tune. And it really is after where you want to know about it. There's nothing in the headers that identifies a tune as coming from abc2win. You have to buffer the entire tune in memory, and examine the text after the tune to see if there's a %... line that contains abc2win. Sorry 'bout dat. There's nothing I can do to fix it. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] abc2win and ! line breaks.
From: John Chambers [EMAIL PROTECTED] ... You have to buffer the entire tune in memory, and examine the text after the tune to see if there's a %... line that contains abc2win. That in itself is no problem. ABC is so concise that buffering a tune in memory is completely trivial these days. In fact when I started writing my import filter, that was the first thing I did - read the whole file into a string with '\n' for newlines and stick a '\0' on the end. Then one can start parsing it sensibly. The dual use of ! is still, as far as I can see, the worst conflict which has come up in existing files, and something therefore which urgently needs sorting out in a standard. *Anything* which helps divine its purpose in existing files is useful at this stage. Dave David Webber Author of MOZART the music processor for Windows - http://www.mozart.co.uk Member of the North Cheshire Concert Band http://www.northcheshire.org.uk To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] abc2win and ! line breaks.
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], David Webber [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes From: I. Oppenheim [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Fri, 4 Jul 2003, John Chambers wrote: BTW, a year or so back, I had my tune finder's search bot count the tunes that seemed to come from abc2win (because of the ! chars, or because they had a % ... abc2win comment). It came to between 9 and 10% of the tunes. Good to have some actual figures! If 1. the above comment means that abc2win always writes its name in a comment and 2. The files which use ! in the middle of a line as a line break are almost all written by abc2win then this is very encouraging news! The standard can be set to say that !...! is a special symbol, and developers can programs to read files on that basis UNLESS the header contains abc2win in which case it is a line break! Someone tell me that life really could be that simple! Please!! Good thought, Dave. You had me excited for a minute. However users of abc2win may well (probably?) encode their abcs by hand with a text editor. Bernard Hill Braeburn Software Author of Music Publisher system Music Software written by musicians for musicians http://www.braeburn.co.uk Selkirk, Scotland To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] abc2win and ! line breaks.
Bernard Hill wrote: In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], David Webber [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes Someone tell me that life really could be that simple! Please!! Good thought, Dave. You had me excited for a minute. However users of abc2win may well (probably?) encode their abcs by hand with a text editor. No, they type it into an entry window in abc2win. The problem is that abc2win does not add its identifier after every tune in the file, only the last one, so you've got to read the file to the end to get it, even if it has thousands of tunes in it. Also many tunes are posted to mailing lists by abc2win users, and end up in compilation files which contain tunes from multiple sources (and without their identifiers). At least one BarFly user habitually adds exclamation marks at the ends of lines to make them work with abc2win (BarFly just ignores them). Some other characteristics of abc2win files: * They play at the wrong speed e.g. R: reel L: 1/8 Q: 100 Plays like a funeral march. It's because abc2win's player program misinterprets the Q: field and plays evrything three or four times faster than specified. Users just compensate by putting a smaller number in the Q: field without bothering about what it actually means. * They contain large numbers of syntax errors (I don't think it does any error checking at all, and accepts any old garbage as abc). Neither of these is very useful for the purpose:-( Phil Taylor To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
