John Chambers wrote:
Maybe we should invite him back. I've
always sorta enjoyed thediscussions that he
started. And it's been quiet around here lately,too quiet
...I think Phil Taylor's response to Don's original enquiry neatly
illustrated one of the reasons I haven't been around for a
Don Whitener wrote -
So far as I can tell, Bryan Creer has not posted to this group
since early August 2003... Has he dropped out for a while?
Thanks for asking Don. It's nice to be missed.
Phil Taylor wrote -
He does rather tend to drop out for long periods of time, then return
to start
It strikes me that there are three processes to carry out -
Remove comments
Combine lines
Parse abc notation
The problem is to decide what order to do them in and to be consistent about it. The above order seems the logical one to me and is what I have already implemented in Abacus.
abc def|
John Chambers wrote -
Actually, that would be equivalent to
%%MIDI no%%ba%%rlines
My idea was that, having read "%%MIDI no\", applications that handled pseudocomments would know to ignore leading "%%" until they got to a line that didn't end "\".
Bryan Creer
Irwin -
Wil (and others), would that be acceptable?
Fine by me.
Bryan Creer
Wil Macaulay wrote -
grumble
then you've got to figure out how to put the cursor in the right place after you've
done all this, if the user made a mistake
/grumble
Yep. But that's your problem not the user's. If I can do it in Abacus (crosses fingers) then so can anyone.
Bryan Creer
Irwin Oppenheim wrote -
Bryans alternative proposal didn't seem unreasonable,
if he can clearly indicate how pseudo comments should
be parsed.
I didn't get that till after my last posting. Have I answered the question? If not, I'm not sure that I see the problem.
Bryan Creer
Irwin Oppenheim wrote -
That's also a reasonable approach. But what do you do
with pseudo comments?
I'm not sure what you mean by pseudo comments. Could you give an example?
This example was only given to show how absurd the
semantics of the 1.6 standard were.
But the 1.6 standard doesn't
Irwin Oppenheim wrote -
I'm not sure what you mean by pseudo comments. Could you give an example?
%%gchordfont times 14
or
%%abc-copyright (C) Copyright John Smith 2003
Well, personally, I don't intend to do anything with them; they are comments and can be ignored. For those who do wish to
From Irwin's standard -
8.3. Accidental directives
%%propagate-accidentals not | octave | pitch
When set to not, accidentals apply only to the note
they're attached to. When set to octave, accidentals
also apply to all the notes of the same pitch in the
same octave up to the end of the
AAARRRGGGHHH! Should I track down every copy and have it destroyed? That's actually Bloke sitting beside me which explains why I'm not kicking him in the head. He was being a bloody nuisance. The rest of us were still trying to do things to do with the Rob Harbron/John Dipper workshop when he
Wrong address.
Please ignore anything libellous.
Bryan Creer
Richard Robinson wrote -
The standard says "It is also possible
to specify a complex meter". Bwahaha. jcabc2ps will accept both 4i/4 and
4/4i without complaint, but only displays the 1st of these correctly.
Interesting.
I think you will find that, with a little rearrangement, 4/4i is equal to
K:A_b^f^c
shouldn't that have a G# also since you've written K:A?
and a lot of other stuff around the same subject.
Perhaps it's time to plug my idea of -
K:_b^f^c tonic=A mode=whatever
Completely unambiguous.
Talking of which, are there any plans for a procedure for amendments or
John Chambers wrote -
Bryan Creer writes:
| Talking of which, are there any plans for a procedure for amendments or
| extensions to the standard or do we just stick to the implement your favourite idea
| and argue about it afterwards system we have now?
What a concept! This is a gang of
Jef Moine wrote -
No problem: it is simpler, and it will be in the next release.
Sorry for I misunderstood the previous thread...
Thanks Jef. It's nice to see a lot of ABCers working in the same direction. I hope Henrik doesn't feel we've slipped past him while he was on holiday.
Bryan Creer
Irwin Oppenheim wrote -
Using ! and !..! in one and the same
tune may lead to disaster if you make a small typo. So,
while "!" should definitely be supported, I encourage
you to support "*" as well.
It just seems to make a messy situation more complicated. You are still going to have to handle !
Jef Moine wrote -
I though from the previous discussion that the length of the chord
was the length of the smallest note (and that's what abcm2ps does).
Then, if you want a bigger length, you may add invisible rests.
In a previous discussion, some people wanted the first note to
give the length
Wil Macaulay wrote -
Another historic moment! Phil and Bryan and I all agree on something! Put it in the
standard, quick, before we lose it!
Oh happy day!
Over to you Jef?
Bryan Creer
Irwin Oppenheim wrote -
On Wed, 23 Jul 2003 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Must? What are you going to do if they don't?
Please read carefully what I wrote. Then you will
understand, that:
1/ Users are not required to manually add any of these
new fields to their ABC files at all.
2/ Programs
Irwin Oppenheim wrote -
line breaking
To force a line break at all times, a star (*) can be
used. The star can be inserted everywhere, where a note
group could.
Deprecated line breaking
The abc2win program used a `!' character to force line
breaks, as is currently supported with the *
Nobody is opposing the [abc]2 idea are they? Can we take that as agreed and get onto the far more important business of different note lengths in one chord?
Irwin Oppenheim wrote -
All the notes within a chord should have the same
length. More complicated chords can be transcribed with
the
Irwin Oppenheim wrote -
Applications which extract separate tunes from a file,
must insert the fields of the original file header,
into the header of the extracted tune.
Software that exports ABC tunes conforming to this
standard, must include a version field.
Software that exports ABC tunes
Jack Campin wrote -
the only program
that does interchange to any other general-purpose score format
in a meaningful way is Bryan's Noteworthy convertor? He probably
has figures for how many people use that but I doubt if it's as
much as 5% of the ABC community.
In my dreams. Rather less than
John Chambers wrote:
©: 1998 Joe Smith ...
But some people might have problems figuring out how to type this. On
many linux and *BSD systems, you can get the copyright symbol with
the ALT-) (or ALT-SHIFT-0) combination, but I don't think this will
work on Windoze or Mac systems.
John Chambers wrote:
So I tried it. Got the Character Map window, found the copyright
char, double clicked on it, went to another window, clicked on it,
went to the Edit menu and selected Paste ... and a capital O with an
acute accent appeared at the cursor point in the window.
There's
John Chambers wrote:
I should maybe mention that this is a somewhat old W98 box
. And reboot is several times per day.
Perhaps it's gone into a sulk because it's heard you being rude about Microsoft.
Bryan Creer
Abacus 2.1.0 is available for download. (2.0.0 never made it into the public arena.)
I've been tinkering with it for so long that I can't remember all the new things since 1.0.0 but it's got a much whizzier interface and things like selecting print size and transposition. Oh yes, it doesn't fall
Excellent! abc2mtex was in clear breach of the standard set by QBasic (and I
bet that wasn't the first).
Bryan Creer
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Phil Taylors wrote -
Bryan Creer wrote:
Phil Taylors extensions to the V: command were largely
incompatible with
the original and you speak of different syntaxes for BarFly and abc2mps
extensions.
If precedence is at all important, BarFly handled multivoice abc before
abcm2ps started. I think
Irwin Oppenheim wrote -
Abc2win is significantly incompatible with the standard
that was set by abc2mtex, and worse, its deviations
have never been documented, up to this day.
Taking the second point first, from the Help files for ABC2WIN -
The exclamation point will force a new staff line when
Jon wrote -
No Brian, it is disregarding the standard. If someone needs to use a symbol,
it is much better that it is agreeed by everyone and that it gets written
into the standard. If it had been agreed that ! could be used as a line
break and that had been documented in the abc standard, I
Frank Nordberg wrote -
An important point here is that BarFly has many of the same special
features as abc2ps/abcm2ps/midiabc, only it uses different syntaxes.
Any programmers here that feel the call to create a nice little
conversion program/script for the benefit of the world at large?
I'd
Frank Nordberg wrote -
No it isn't. ABC2WIN's ! syntax is breaking (no pun intended) the
official ABC standard (as Chris Walshaw published it).
A) According to the chronology compiled by John Chambers on the abc home
page, Chris Walshaw's published standard followed about 16 months after the
Richard Robinson wrote -
abc2win introduced constructs, out of the blue,
that the abc-ps family have never _been_ able to read.
I really wish I understood this hate campaign against abc2win. On his website, Jim Vint credits a great many people who gave him support some of whom are still active
Guido Gonzato wrote -
abcm2ps is one of my favourite pieces of software _ever_.
In my view, it's so good and well thought-out that the standard should
follow it closely.
Taken together with his earlier comment that -
other applications will have better try and follow the new standard for
their
John Chambers wrote -
I've also found the phrase explicit key signature more useful than
global accidentals, though I don't suppose that's a real big deal.
These seem to me to be two separate things. Whem converted to conventional
notation, an explicit key signature is the collection of
John Chambers wrote -
The difference is somewhat minimal, though. The original text had as
example K:D =c, which implies a key signature of two sharps but
with a natural written before all the c's. The natural reaction to
this is If all the c's are natural, why put a c sharp in
Guido said -
I've been unable to find ABC files with the much-talked-about bang (!) for
breaking lines. Could any good soul send me some examples? It's for
extending abcpp to deal with this beast.
Well here's one for a start -
X: 1
T:Black Boy. ASH.01
M:2/4
L:1/8
Q:200
S:Harrison Wall
Phil Taylor wrote -
I'm told that recent versions of abcm2ps use the
operator to set the time point back to the beginning
of a bar so that an additional layer of notes can be
added. This sounds like a good idea, but I haven't
seen any detailed description of how it works.
(and Irwin gave
Phil Taylor wrote -
That's a classic example of everything we don't like about abc2win.
The VMP files contain not only bangs, but every garbage variant
of abc you can think of, and consequently are unusable to any other
program unless you do a considerable amount of editing first. It's
such
Henrik Norbeck wrote -
Bryan Creer wrote about the symbol:
Did anyone outside the abcm2ps community know
about this until now. If another developer had started using
for their pet idea we'd have the same sort of conflict.
It was discussed on this list before it was implemented in abcm2ps.
Irwin Oppenheim wrote -
This idea was proposed by Taral on this list on
Mon, 22 Oct 2001 08:43:51 -0700.
It was found to be a good idea, and has been adopted by
abcm2ps and maybe some other programs as well.
A lot of ideas are proposed on this list and discussed at great length. It
is often
Don wrote -
Someone was speaking of errors, and I just found that I can consistently
cause a Run-time error by following these steps:
1. Open an existing file.
2. Click the 'Full ABC' button, which opens the Full ABC window and listing.
3. Close the Full ABC window with the Windows 'X' button
Phil Taylor wrote -
That's the problem with live editing. The parser has to be
absolutely bullet-proof, as the user can hit it with absolutely
any combination of symbols. There is really no way you can
test it enough either. That's one reason why I kept BarFly
free for several years while
I know it is fasionable to slag off abc2win on this list (and, obviously, I'm not too keen on it or I wouldn't be writing Abacus) but can we get a little historical perspective?
>From Chris Walshaw's history of ABC on his abc home page -
The real explosion in interest came when Jim Vint released
Bernard Hill wrote -
I hope you are not implying that software sold by shareware methods is
not as good as that sold off-the-shelf?
It's probably better in some ways. For an analogy, if you buy your
vegetables from your neighbour who's grown them in his back garden they are probably
better
Irwin Oppenheim wrote -
As far as I could check, the source code of abc2win has
not been released. So how could we do that?
Well, you could try being nice to Jim Vint and inviting him to join in the
standards process.
Bryan Creer
To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to:
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.
Maybe I should revive that code and do another count ...
Could you count the tunes that use !! ?
Bryan Creer
To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your
Irwin Oppenheim said -
On Thu, 3 Jul 2003 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
That's exactly what Abacus does. Version 1 is
available from http://www.abacusmusic.co.uk/ but hang
around, maybe just for a few days, and version 2 will
be out.
Seems to be a nice idea! Only too bad that when I made
a
Emerging from a long hibernation to say how glad I am to see that a great
deal of sense is being talked about the possibilities for a new standard;
especially by some of the newer members of this list.
I am not am abcm2ps user but, as far as I understand it, Jean-François is
doing brilliant
Buddha Buck wrote -
Based on the
first note medody idea that's been bandied around, that would imply
that the melody was [d6]2B2B2, which would sound like:
V:1
d6
V:2
z2B2B2
which is rather too polyphoneous as a melody for my tastes.
Well I'm sorry about that because that's precisely what I
Have a look at this -
http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/xmlMusic.html
Bryan
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Henrik Norbeck wrote -
Maybe we should have an obfuscated abc competition...
I think we've had one for several years now.
Bryan Creer
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Eric Forgeot wrote -
I have two sound cards on my system and it has revealed that
Abacus doesn't follow the sound properties in the MSwindows
configuration : I have the second one by default for playing
samples / midi but Abacus plays only with the first one.
I'm afraid I don't have the
Henrik Norbeck wrote -
You must have some sort of preferences dialog to let the user
select which midi device to use. There are Windows functions for
getting a list of midi devices. You must open the midi device
anyway, so just specify the correct device to open according to the
user's
Frankly Laurie I can't be bothered to argue the minutiae
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Ooops! Clicked the wrong button. Starting again -
Frankly Laurie, I can't be bothered to argue the minutiae of which way is
best. What I consider most important is that we have a concensus. We seemed
to have one before you came back from Sidmouth. If you can persuade
everybody else that
Eric Forgeot wrote -
I've reported in the past a print problem for abacus ...
Unfortunately, I can only test with the printer I've got. I'll enquire
amongst my beta testers, but at the moment, Eric is the only person
reporting problems. Anybody else?
Bryan Creer
To subscribe/unsubscribe,
Henrik Norbert wrote -
So two of the most used* abc programs, Muse and AbcMus, both
use the shortest determines length method, which seems to
work well. I've had no complaints so far. Have you, Laurie? Do we
really have to change it?
But a few days ago he wrote -
Now that I understand what
Jack Campin wrote -
OK, I'm with you and it's growing on me. It would be necessary for
something I saw the other day which would need to be written
[d6z2]2[B2G2][B2G2] although there would still need to be intelligence
within the programme to recognise that the two Bs were not melody notes.
Starling wrote -
... I had one question. What is a melody note? I have always
known melodies as defined by context, and subject to much
interpretation, rather than being defined by a specific type of
notation. Two different people can call a section of music melody or
accompaniment, and
Starling (?) wrote -
It might be better to have the duration of the chord
equal to the shortest duration within the chord. That way
[L:1/4][A4G2E2] is implicitly equal to a half note, just as in
keyboard music the shortest note in the chord is considered the length
before the next note begins.
Starling wrote -
We should probably establish that there is a difference between
[G2A4E2] and [G2A2E2] if we're going to standardize by the rule first
listed note = melody note. Something like The melody note in a
chord determines the default duration, but durations specified
within the chord
John Chambers wrote -
Well, I can think of a simple example of how one might use this:
[A4G2E2]2[F2D2]
This would have a 4-count melody note above the [G2E2][F2D2] chord
change. With L:1/8, the first chord could be drawn on a single stem,
with an open oval for the A4 note and filled ovals
Jack Campi wrote -
This is a very good idea, but the semantics I'd need in every instance
where I've wanted it would be that the *shortest* note counts.
So Eric wants longest note counts, Jack wants shortest note counts, I went
for highest note counts and suggested first note counts
Phil Taylor wrote -
BarFly handles chords with notes of unequal
length by padding out the shorter notes with rests when playing,
so it's longest note prevails.
But Jack Campin (a BarFly user) had said -
but the semantics I'd need in every instance
where I've wanted it would be that the
Wil Macaulay wrote -
BTW, Abacus worked pretty well for me, except that
it crashed when I tried to change instruments (WinNT wkstation 4.0)
running as a non-admin user.
Would this be Runtime error 70? This seems to happen on every version of
Windows except 98. I think I've fixed it but I
Eric Forgeot wrote -
Nice program ! I like when there are new abc applications, so I
can complete my collection :)
Thanks Eric and thanks for the comments, some of which I agree with and
others not.
ACTION: SystemFile: C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\MSVBVM60.DLL
(File currently on disk was already up to
Something that has cropped up during the testing of Abacus is the use of the
.abc extension. A friend, not unreasonably, double clicked on an abc file
expecting it to start my programme. What they actually got was ABC
Flowcharter; a programme for drawing flowcharts produced by Micrografx
Abacus 1.0.0 is now available from http://www.abacusmusic.co.uk/. Note that
this is not my old AOL website.
Abacus is an abc editor/player/printer programme - Windows only I'm afraid.
Its main claims to fame are that it plays through the soundcard with complete
choice of General Midi
I just tried it and it seems to be available at the moment. AOL have been
causing me a lot of grief and I will be taking my custom elsewhere soon.
The new abc editor/player/printer programme is nearly finished and will be
available shortly (honestly).
Bryan Creer
To subscribe/unsubscribe,
Now that I've calmed down a bit I'll have another go.
I think you are underestimating the cultural sophistication of English
farmworkers by a VERY large margin.
I'm not sure why saying that traditional singers could get all the
information they needed from the music without having to read
Phil Taylor wrote -
I think you guys are actually arguing from the same side of the fence.
Thanks Phil we needed that and thank you for a posting which I was largely
able to agree with.
After being reprimanded by a Scotsman for something I hadn't said about
English farmworkers I did rather
Jack Campin wrote -
I think you are underestimating the cultural sophistication of English
farmworkers by a VERY large margin. Nearly all of them went to church,
and for most of the areas Sharp, Lloyd and Vaughan Williams collected
in, that church was the Church of England. With a tradition of
Jack Campin wrote -
As others have pointed out, the description of a tune purely by key
signature isn't complete unless you are using equal temperament; you
don't know the exact pitches of the notes unless you know the mode.
As I have pointed out, the mode is in the tune and may vary as it goes
Robert Bley-Vroman wrote -
Will major-scale tune with some flatted sevenths be transcribed with the
flatted
seventh as part of the key signature, or with the flatted sevenths
indicated as accidentals within the body of the tune?
Whichever you like as long as you specify all the notes
John Chambers wrote -
But if the software doesn't agree on what pieces
of the notation mean, it can sorta interfere with getting
the music across.
I've been thinking along the same lines myself for quite a while.
And abc has a quandary that's common in all other kinds of
computer
Than you Phil Taylor for a sensibly argued case. A welcome change from the
this-is-my-opinion-and-I'm-sticking-to-it attitude that has been prevalent
lately. Unfortunately I didn't agree with any of it.
He wrote -
In order to describe a piece of music completely, you need to
know any two of
Phil Taylor wrote -
Even a wrong tonic+mode is better than nothing!
I don't think I need to comment.
Bryan Creer
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Wil Macaulay said -
Yes, it would be 'better and less misleading' for the abc user community
that
understands:
1. 2 sharps
Good.
2. they are in the 'standard' place
Not sure what you mean.
3. E Dorian means E is the tonic.
Of course it does but does K:D mean D is the tonic or just
John Chambers wrote -
For example, recently I saw a line like: K:D % EDorian
It could be that the author was using software that only allowed the tonic as
shorthand for the key signature and didn't support modes (such programmes
have been known to exist). He should be praised for adding the
Eric Forgeot wrote -
I thought it was a good idea to use 2 K: fields to write both the
mode and the key, but this solution of K:D % EDorian is maybe
better. Will you forgive me if I use it in the future ? :)
Wouldn't it be better and less misleading to be able to say K:^f^c % EDorian
or
John Chambers wrote-
There is a problem applying the GPL to music. The way it's phrased,
it really does apply mostly to software. Of course, that was what it
was designed for.
I was recently browsing in a garden centre when I found a lavender with a
label saying something to the effect that
John Chambers wrote -
Heh. In this case, I was the lead musician..
Hmm. Benevolent dictatorship. Probably the best sort of government if you
can find the right dictator.
Thank you for the rest of that posting; it was very positive.
How about posting the galactic coordinates? And
Laurie Griffiths wrote -
Who ever wrote I want it my way and no other.. Nobody, right?
You just made it up, right?
Nobody said it. I made it up. It was my ironic precis of John Chambers's
assertion that -
The opposition was essentially from
people who didn't need it and didn't see why
John Chambers wrote -
Well, actually, last evening at this time I was playing music at a
contra dance with some nice people.
I'm delighted to hear it. Do all these nice people share the same
self-centred I want it my way and no other. that you seem to think is
completely standard
Aaron Newman wrote -
The modes-as-key-signatures are part of the 1.6 standard, maybe what you're
saying is that this originally popped up as part of a tool and was
incorporated into
the standard out of necessity.
That was certainly my understanding. The prevailing culture amongst abc
John Chambers wrote -
My perspective was that it wasn't so much opposition as it was Who
the hell needs it? There were lots of positive reactions from people
who saw a personal use for it. The opposition was essentially from
people who didn't need it and didn't see why abc should be
Wendy wrote -
It would have been great if the original standard had had separate
fields for key signature and tonic, so that the tonic could be specified
by itself and the key signature expressed in pure sharps and flats, like
the extension in John Chambers' jcabc2ps allows. It would have been
Laura Conrad wrote -
Currently, the abc2midi transposer only understands the key
signature. So if I have a piece in D dorian, and I transpose it up 3
half notes, the transposed output is in Ab. It should be in F dorian.
This is an inevitable consequence of using tonic/mode in the K: command.
gris_sanderson said -
HP Hp are scale specific rather than instrument specific. You can play a
pipe tune on a fiddle provided you know what the pipe mode is.
Fair enough. Can you point me to any documentation and/or examples of their
use?
Bryan Creer
To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your
Don Whitener said -
Are you *actively* pursuing development of a new program, and, if so, is
there a projected release date? Just curious... You do indeed do good work
:-)
Well, thank you very much. Yes, I am. Unfortunately, these things are never
quite as easy as they seem when you start
Laurie Griffiths said -
I went to Chipenham Folk Festival last weekend and
someone played it in the English Session in the Rose and Crown barn. I
asked what it was called (The Dark Girl Dressed in Blue) and I now have
about 10 different versions of it. Magic.
Yes, great tune and great
John Walsh -
One basis of misunderstanding here may be an assumption that
instrument-specific notation must be carved in stone in the language--as
u and v for upbow and downbow are now, for instance. It doesn't. (It
can't, really, for abc doesn't have the resources. In my own case, I have
Strike the concertina's melancholy string!
Blow the spirit-stirring harp like anything!
W.S.Gilbert
Laurie Griffiths said -
An instruction to play a note on fret 9 of the G string instead of the open
E string is musically relevant.
My concertina doesn't have E or G strings and I'm not playing
Phil Taylor wrote
If Laurie wants to write
something like ^F9S3e in his music to indicate that the note is to be
played
at a particular point on the fingerboard I don't see why he shouldn't.
Fingerboard of what instrument? Banjo? Lute? Cittern? Balalaika? Guitar
tuned DADGAD? Players of
Laurie Griffiths wrote
Well of course you need to specify the tuning for tablature.
Obviously.
The only interesting question is how much
of this, if any, should be encoded in the ABC.
None at all, because ABC is not tablature. The recipient could be playing
anything from a carillon to a
John Walsh said
Oh, did Bryan mean that statement seriously? Hmm... I thought
there was a hint of sarcasm there, just as I've taken this entire
thread as an indirect demonstration that the saying abc is for the music
alone* (_whatever_ that may mean), is a worthy rule of thumb for overall
Just for the record, abc2nwc produces identical and, as far as I can tell,
correct output from both the legal and illegal versions of Springleik
posted by Eric Forgeot. In the latter case it produces an error report
saying it has replaced the illegal ties with slurs. Both versions are
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