Wil Macaulay wrote:
>
> Lets have a little reality check here, and ask ourselves a couple of simple
>questions:
> Why are there almost twenty thousand tunes freely available in abc format
> on the internet, more than two orders of magnitude more than any other format?
You're underestimating both ABC and "other formats" here.
Musica Viva alone has 2192 tunes in GIF format - 313 of them are also in
PDF format and 1239 of them in ABC format.
I've started building a multiformat sheet music search engine, indexing
music in GIF, JPEG, PS, PDF and ABC formats (the only truly
cross-platform compatible formats for notated music). So far I've only
managed to catalogue 47 sites (less than one tenth of the sites that are
actually out there) and the stats are:
GIF/JPEG: 7560
PDF/PS: 1740
ABC: 6056
These numbers seems to reflect fairly well the relative popularity
between the different formats. I'd estimate that the actual number of
titles available on Internet is between 10 and 20 times as high.
>
> There are other reasons for using abc - it is much faster to touch-type than
> most drag-n-drop music editors,...
That's true of course, but *nobody* uses pure drag-n-drop programs for
music typesetting on a large scale. That would simply be far too time consuming.
Actually the working methods for people using high-end notation programs
like Finale and Sibelius are remarkably similar to typing ABC. You press
a letter key for the note name, a number key for the note value and some
other key (+ and - rather than ^ and _ ) for accidentals.
>
> I would be the first to encourage an abc-XML translator, in fact I've toyed with
> the idea myself. But I have a vested interest (as a musician, not a programmer)
> in keeping the flood of tunes coming, so I want to keep abc as human-friendly
> as possible, while adding features that encourage tuneswappers to keep entering
> tunes in as many cultural traditions as possible.
Eric Galluzzo wrote:
>
> Personally, I think XML is completely wrong for ABC -- the two have very
> different aims, as has been said before.
IMHO this is one of the best arguments for abc2xml and xml2abc
converters. We need something far more powerful than ABC and we don't
want to mess up the simplicity that is ABC's main strength. In other
words we need a different - far more detailed - standard than ABC, and
we want a way to translate files between the two standards.
Frank Nordberg
To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
