Given the variety of answers on the key or keys for Scan Tester's No 2, I
rest my case.
Richard Robinson says -
I've found myself tending to play,
particularly, Go to Berwick with a 13 beat.
I think we probably mean the same thing here, I was just being a bit sloppy
in the way I described
There is now a new version of ABCcheck available from
http://members.aol.com/abacusmusic/.
I've improved the front end to make it more standard, changed it so you don't
lose the abc source when you produce the validation report (not both on
screen at the same time, but you can switch between
Thanks for all the feedback. I'll give detailed replies after the weekend.
In the meantime, remember that this is just a report which you can ignore at
your will. Please take time to look at the help files which may not be great
literature but contain quite a lot of useful information. In
Jack Campin says -
My pet hate is excessive automation. I DO NOT want the process of
installing system-critical software gizmos buried in an unreadable
script.
Judging by your website, Jack, you are a highly experienced computer user.
Most people aren't. A lot of people are going to be
Wendy Galovich says -
..And thank you Bryan, for indirectly acknowledging through your
wording here that there ARE legitimate reasons for *continuing* to sup-
port the tonic/mode system as a choice, apart from the need to have
other choices as well.
I have DIRECTLY acknowledged that in
Phil Taylor says -
If this change in standard
becomes accepted, the vast majority of users will use it not just for
the ambiguous tunes where it is appropriate, but for ALL transcriptions.
You want to stop this change in standard because it is something the vast
majority of users want? As
Phil Taylor says -
The difference is that you still write the tonic. Of course you can
subvert that if you want by writing C (+ some arbitrary accidentals),
but then you can do that now.
No I can't. I want a meaningful key signature at the start not a load of
accidentals scattered through
Phil Taylor says -
Any system of democracy involves a franchise: there are always some people
who are entitled to vote and some who are not. We don't allow children,
criminals, lunatics or the Queen to elect our politicians
I'm sure "the vast majority of users" will be glad to know the
John Chamber says -
You can follow the standard to the letter, yes, but your code
will work better with existing ABC if it can parse the common
violations that people post to lists.
At the risk of enhancing my reputation for negativity, I have to say that I
think this policy has
Wendy Galovich says -
That being the case, Brian, then the first thing I'd do is put
those abcs out on the site in plain text format, rather than, or at
least in addition to the zipped files. Every site I've seen listed on
the ABC index on Chris Walshaw's site has the notation out in
Wendy Galovich says -
I hope they wouldn't mind if you wanted to add your tune pages to
the world wide index at some point, once the abcs are in plain text.
No problem, but bear in mind these tunes are aimed at relatively
inexperienced musicians who want to join in some of the tune
Excuse the change of subject line, but I didn't think Modes, democracy and
benevolent(?) dictatorship was quite what was being talked about anymore.
Laurie Griffiths says -
These details have the potential for allowing music
created by hand and "checked" by one package to be
unacceptable to
There is a collection of about 144 tunes as played in the Lewes area of East
Sussex, England at http://members.aol.com/LewesArmsFolk/Lewesfav.html. The
tunes are available in abc format, Noteworthy and midi (Well most of them.
I'll get them finished soon, I promise.) As with John's
John Chambers asks -
How about other proprietary formats?
Is there a way to find them? Do any of them have online communities
of users?
Well, it will come as no surprise to people to know that I think Noteworthy
Composer is pretty good. This is shareware and can be found at
Jack Campin says -
Existing software, or future software for that matter, is hardly going
to remove pages from the web, is it?
No, but can't we try and stop it getting any worse? This is where I came in
many months ago with an appeal to developers to exercise a bit of restraint.
Innovate,
Laurie Griffiths says -
Some examples
were posted to the list which were alleged to be incompatible
with each other. I imported them all (actually I think there
were only two) into Muse and they all worked fine. I
reported that and then shut up. As far as I was concerned
that wasn't
From Steve Mansfield -
Try http://www.lesession.demon.co.uk/abc/abc_extensions#annot as a
starting place - and if I've documented them in there, they must be in one
of the abc standards documents on Chris W's site (I would suspect, but
haven't checked, in the 1.7.6 proposal, as that's where
Steve Mansfield said -
My apologies, I omitted a .htm after extensions. You seem to have
managed to locate the page eventually despite my error though.
Thanks Steve. Found it now. A lot of good stuff there.
And how precisely is that 'not a widely held view'?
I share that view but a lot of
Wil Macaulay says -
But any text within double quotes that _does_ start with one
of those symbols can be safely used as an annotation, so IT IS NOW POSSIBLE
to write an abc file that can be safely played by abc2midi (or BarFly, or
Muse) and
properly displayed by abc2ps (or BarFly or Muse).
I
Laurie Griffiths says -
But that's what market forces are all about. It's the customer's job
to decide how many favours and how many disfavours the software
bestows.
Maybe that's why abc2win is so popular.
If their whims differ too much from the developers then they won't use it.
BarFly has
James Allwright says -
The potential conflict with abc2win code can be resolved fairly easily
in the parser by looking forward to see if an ! is at the end of a line
or not.
Not so, I'm afraid. The following is from the abc2win documentation -
The exclamation point will force a new staff
John Chambers says -
And now Bruce is part of the cabal that's inflicting its
own ideas about ABC on the poor, oppressed user community.
Maybe that's what he was trying to distance himself from.
So now he will be subject to
all the usual criticism for hist dictatorial infliction of useful
My programme for conversion between abc and Noteworthy composer format is now
available from http://members.aol.com/abacusmusic/ as very cheap shareware.
As well as conforming to abc standard 1.6 (I hope) it also includes multiple
voices using either the V: command or separate abc for each
Laurie Griffiths said -
Everybody tries to be as polite and constructive as possible.
Not universally true in my experience.
Everyone tries to understand the other points of view.
DEFINITELY not true in my experience.
Some "fights" happen despite best intentions.
Definitely TRUE in my
John Chanbers said -
You may post anything you like, but
the others are then expected to flame you royally if you disagree
from their own ideas.
You don't go for Laurie Griffiths' idea of polite discussion then?
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two
opposed ideas in
I can't help feeling that the subject of this thread is no longer entirely
appropriate.
Any way...
Laurie Griffiths said -
'we like it this way, and reading this thread will show who "we" are'.
It doesn't matter who "We" are. By that statement you are making some sort
of claim to authority
Frank Nordberg said -
John and Laura decided to recruit committee members among the most
active posters at abcusers.
Strange. They didn't ask me.
I was one of the people who was asked to join the committee, but I
declined, suggesting they should concentrate on the major abc developers
Richard Robinson said -
Perhaps that's because you seem to spend 90% of your posts getting
aggrieved and appearing to dislike everyone else.
That's odd. I thought I spent 90% of my posts trying to explain what I
meant, as patiently as I could, to people who seemed to be prepared to attack
me,
Richard Robinson said -
You're right. I apologise for my failure of politeness and patience.
Thank you Richard. I know I get up peoples noses but I wish they would
recognise my commitment to and admiration for abc. ABC2NWC may not fit in
with everyones needs but it was no trivial task. A
Larry Allen asks -
Where can I acquire a copy of ABC2NWC.
From http://members.aol.com/abacusmusic/
It might be worth mentioning that you can produce midi from Noteworthy.
Bryan Creer
I had planned to watch this thread for a while before adding my thoughts but
now there is so much to respond to that it's hard to know where to start so
here are a few random hits -
John Chambers said -
Just a few days ago, I was asked why www.irishtunes.net isn't very
well represented in
Frank Nordberg said -
Hi Bryan - I had begun to wonder if you were on a vacation trip or something.
Hi Frank- no, but after Phil Taylor's descent into puerile personal abuse and
the subsequent failure of anyone else to tick him off for breach of etiquette
I decided I'd had enough for a while
Phil Taylor says -
Does ABCcheck report a space in the M: field as an error?
No it doesn't. This is a specific problem to do with abc2win (so it will
give you another stick to beat it with.)
The problem was not with ABCcheck but with abc2nwc. abc2win allows inline
commands just by plonking
Just to get this one out of the way...
John Chambers says -
This is presumably the source of his use of the term "hypocrisy".
I've just done a quick check and I can't find the term "hypocrisy" in any
posting of mine I've still got on file (and I don't tidy up very often). I
didn't actually
Laurie Griffiths said -
Muse uses ; to include fingering hints in ABC.
i.e. a3;4 means play the a on the 4th string (probably
at the 12th fret for guitar).
Great idea. I might use this for cross fingering on English concertina and
perhaps I could adapt it to indicate forked F on the oboe.
I
Phil Taylor wrote -
All extensions start out as program-specific.
Why? Why shouldn't they start out as proposals for discussion and feedback
from other developers and even users? That way the idea might be improved on
and clashes avoided and the resulting definition included in the standard
Phil Taylor said -
The tune will work with Muse and abcm2ps with a minimal
amount of editing (just insert a return after every V:n field).
Why should users have to do that? How are they going to know that's what
they have to do? They may not be on this list. They may never have heard of
Phil Taylor said -
The standard is abc v1.6. There's also a proposed draft
standard which is still under discussion. Neither of them even
mentions multivoice abc. Does that mean that nobody is allowed
to post tunes which use the V: field to this group, which is
devoted to the discussion of the
Laura Conrad said -
What we need is a developer who is going to:
Use open source, so that anyone can fix bugs.
Roll contributions from other people into the source.
Implement the standard as written.
Clearly label any extensions to the standard used by the
program.
Write code that can
Taral said -
I'd also like to announce that I will be making the following amendments
to the standard in libabc:
I'm not sure about unilateral declarations of changes to the standard but nobody from the standards committee seems to have complained. The trouble is, you have no way of enforcing
Bert Van Vreckem said -
I don't see how an open source abclib can have any influence on, let
alone be a threat for these projects. What exactly do you mean?
I don't see abc as being defined by any software implementation but to
be a standard (or, perhaps, a protocol would be better) for the
Jack Campin said -
BarFly doesn't *have* output; it's a text editor, it doesn't enforce
any ABC dialect any more than Emacs does.
Don't text editors have output?
I am not a Mac user so I have no direct experience of the nature of BarFly, but I do know that a number of people have posted tunes
Funny how a thread subject can drift so far from the original and yet still remain appropriate.
Frank Nordberg said -
BarFly follows the standard (ABC 1.6) pretty well, but all abc
applications differs when it comes to various extensions.
Yes, I think it does. (If it's only a text editor why
Jack Campin said -
Programs like abc2win only let you output ABC they can interpret.
abc2win has come under considerable critiscism on this list for its deviations from the standard. After not inconsiderable effort on my part, abc2nwc now accepts abc2win tunes without much trouble. This was
Eric Mrozek said -
Bryan, this is an open list - you won't get anyone to agree to your
personal terms. You'd be best off to just post your thoughts and don't
mind the critique, whether it's meant personally or not.
Well, some of the critique has been extremely personal. Of course I'm going to
Laurie Griffiths said -
There was a move - and I was part of it - to try to make some sort of
progress on the standard. Part of the thinking was that the fewer people
involved the quicker we might agree. Part of the thinking was that if we
enhanced the standard, even if we didn't do it the way
Frank Nordberg said -
Richard Robinson wrote:
Particularly, the way that every
time a new poster appears here, they are informed that this is a no-good
bunch of people, an arrogant self-selected clique
...
Yep, that sounds like us ;-)
I've never thought that you (we?) were a no-good bunch
Richard Robinson said -
On Wed, 31 Oct 2001 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
.. Richard Robinson and others
have argued that the development of the abc standard should be
associated with a software project.
I have reviewed all my postings to this thread, since
Wendy Galovich said-
A Wiki page? See http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WhatIsaWiki
What I'm thinking here is that if an editable page - say, a table listing abc
applications against each detail of the standard specifications, was publicly
available, a sizeable group of contributors could
(Probably the best subject line yet.)
John ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) said -
Why couldn't non-specificity simply be included as one of the project's
requirements?
Here's more what I have in mind... Picture your ideal standardization
committee/forum/whatever, and now simply imagine that same thing
Anselm Lingnau said -
Nothing should go in the
standard unless it has been proved that it is actually implementable
with reasonable effort. This may mean that sooner or later one might hit
a dead end with some feature or other, but it will be much harder to get
the standard fixed if the feature
Guido Gonzato said -
As a computer guy, I already have a new
syntax ready that just waits to be put down on paper...
I let you guess the reasons why I didn't put it down on paper. But if you're
interested, wave your hand at me.
Might be a good idea Guido. It would take the pressure of a simple
A while ago James Allwright said -
The problem of abritrary text has come up before and "_ " is the agreed
syntax for arbitrary text
and more recently -
This was resolved ages ago. Q:120 takes the value of unit note length
from the header. If there is a new L: field in the body of the tune,
the
James Allwright said -
The "_ " construct is in the draft standard and probably documented in
the application notes for a number of abc applications.
I concede. You are right. (Why didn't you say this in the first place?)
You could have added this from the draft standard -
$ A meter change
John Chambers recently said -
But it's possible that we could put it to a vote,
How would this be administered? Who would get a vote? Just the BIG 6? Only developers? Anybody who wants to?
But again, it's not topic of major importance. More important is that
we get some action making this
Jack Campin says -
repeat signs are bars,
I don't think so. At a quick glance, seven out of the first twelve tunes in the Northumbrian Piper's Tune Book have repeat symbols that don't coincide with bars.
Also, if you want to reorganize the line breaks, you have to edit the
adjacent :| and |:
John Chambers said -
As I've noted before, we have a population of users who
can't even be bothered to type "X:1" at the start of their tunes.
I've heard it said that if a door is clearly marked PULL but everyone who comes to it tries to PUSH, it is not because they are all stupid; it is
Buddha Buck said -
I have seen a couple of pieces of music, typeset with NoteWorthy that
uses nested repeats. The outer repeats (which covered the entire
work) were drawn light, while the inner repeats were drawn bold.
NoteWorthy Composer has two sorts of repeat called (for no obvious reason)
I haven't bothered the list for a while largely because I got fed up with
banging my head against a brick wall but John Chambers' contribution has
stirred me from my slumber -
All this is fun and interesting, but I think we have more important
things to worry about than how someone might
I use Noteworthy Composer which provides an uncluttered GUI interface for
music composition and plays back throught the soundcard. It is available as
shareware from http://www.ntworthy.com/.
Unfortunately, it does not export/import abc so I have written a shareware
programme called abc2nwc
Nice work Frank.
The up tempo feel of The Girl I Left Behind Me (known as Brighton Camp around
here, I live ten miles from Brighton) is anticipation -
And if the night be ever so dark
Or ever so wet and windy
I must return to the Brighton Camp
And the girl I left behind me.
Adjust windy to
Steve Mansfield
Let's face it there's only three (or is it four) parallel groups all
looking at extending the abc specification, eg
this list
the sub-committee of this list set up last year
abctf / abc+ / abc 2.0 (I forget are they distinct or all the same?)
sourceforge
You forgot Guido
Frank Nordberg asked
A rant? Is there actually a dance called that???
The rant is a northern English dance form which, to be honest, I don't know a
lot about. There is a dance step called a rant which is a bit difficult to
demonstrate over the internet (OK, with my knees, it's a bit
Joe Mc Cool said -
I was told once that Hornpipes came originally from France
And I once heard that jigs were invented by the English, reels by the Scots
and the only sort of tune invented by the Irish was the polka
Er? Yeah, right
Bryan
To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to:
Sorry Guido, I hadn't realised that your initiative was called abc+ or that
you'd set up a website Did I miss the launch? The last I recall you were
releasing it to a select few interested parties
I'll have a read and comment later
Bryan
To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to:
Jack Campin said -
The first halves are almost the same:
Gosh, so they are and yet so very different I was less familiar with
Gilderoy than the others and it seems to bridge the gap
Bryan
To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://wwwtullochgormcom/listshtml
Richard Robinson said -
I want to do some fiddling about with the body of VMP
tunes, most of which come from abc2win. The number of ways this output has
of blowing up rest-of-the-world tunes is quite remarkable, and is wasting
whole days out of my life. Has anybody succeeded in writing a
Mike Whitaker -
- people who can't distinguish between a single standard that allows
chords to be machine-readable, and 'you've left my pet notation out'
Just the sort of thing I've been trying to say about the standard in general
for some time.
and Laurie Griffiths said -
Brilliantly put.
John Chambers wrote -
There's no way any of you can stop me from using my own code.
Wouldn't dream of it old chap. We seem to have completely different ideas of
what a standard means. You seem to think it's to stop people doing things.
I think it's to enable people to do things. More
John Chambers wrote -
Of course, there's a very real fear that once something gets into a
standard, there will be social pressure to implement it. ;-)
Why would something be in the standard if nobody wanted it? If people wanted
it, why shouldn't it be in the standard? The social pressure
John Chambers wrote -
Geez; there's always someone who will respond seriously to a joke!
Sorry. You make so many comments to the effect that standards are a BAD
THING that I didn't realise this one was meant to be a joke. (Curious
attitude for a member of the standards committee.)
Thanks
This morning I had one junk email from the abcusers list and seven talking
about it (here's another). Just delete junk and forget it.
Bryan
To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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-
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
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 -
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
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 -
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
To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
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
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
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
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