Laura writes:
| >>>>> "Frank" == Frank Nordberg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
| >> I think Wil was talking about formats in which music *information* is
| >> available, not formats which graphically display information. All the
| >> stuff in GIF or PDF on Musica Viva comes from music information which
| >> has been entered in some other format, such as ABC or finale.
|
| Frank> That's true of course, but I hardly think the end user
| Frank> would consider that important.
|
| Given you don't give the source except for the ABC, it's not.
|
| But if you want to transpose or re-edit the music, it's critically
| important. And I have a lot of "end users" who want to do that with
| mine.
Yeah. And, not surprisingly, I hear from people who like to be able
to look things up. Even if you don't care about doing anything but
printing the tune out, or maybe learning it off the screen, it's
still nice to be able to find it. It isn't obvious to me how one
would go about finding musical GIFs and JPEGs, and making an index of
the titles. So, even if there are a lot of them out there (and there
are), they're not very useful to people looking for a particular
piece of music.
This isn't to say that ABC is perfect. A lot of people would like to
look things up by the notes. Like standard staff notation, ABC has a
lot of variety to how one can transcribe a tune, and matching is not
trivial.
Meanwhile, closer to the previous topic: There are a number of music
formats used by the commercial packages, such as Finale. Are there
very many Finale files online? How about other proprietary formats?
Is there a way to find them? Do any of them have online communities
of users?
The main thing that impressed me with ABC was the fact that I could
email tunes to friends. I'd played around with various of the music
packages, but none of them was very interesting. I mean, no matter
how pretty it looks on the screen, if I can't share it with friends
(regardless of what sort of computer software they are using), why
would I bother? The point of music notation is to communicate music
to others. So far, ABC seems to be the only emailable music notation.
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