Phil Taylor writes:
| John Chambers wrote:
| >While the great chord debate rages on, I thought I'd toss out what
| >I've implemented in my abc2ps clone for handling more kinds of
| >endings and repeats than the rather limited ABC 1.6 allows.
| <snip>
|
| I have no real objection to this, and in fact have already implemented
| some of it in BarFly. However, while it is perfectly easy for display
| programs to implement, when it comes to playing abc that's another story!
| One immediate problem is that there are many tunes out there which are
| (incorrectly) written as:
|
| |: ,,, |1 ... :|2 ... :| ...
|
| BarFly (and probably other players too) will patch this up and let
| it play correctly because it _knows_ that only two repeats are possible.
| Once higher numbers of repeats become available this has to be flagged
| as an error (missing third repeat).
This can't possibly be treated as an error, because it's how the
current ABC standard requires that one write a 4-times repeat with
two endings. There are a lot of ABC files written this way, with a
lot of grumbling about ABC's limitations. Nobody likes it, but it's
not an error if the software forces you to write it that way. Until
most of these tunes get rewritten, software should accept this as
correct 1.6 ABC. And, of course, the ABC won't be rewritten until
software generally accepts the better notation.
One problem is that too many people treat that final :| as a typo. It
causes a lot of problems with people trying to read music, because a
lot of them will also treat the final repeat as a typo and barge
ahead, while the other half of the group does the repeat. But it
isn't a typo or error at all; it's simply the best that ABC permits.
Ignoring the final :| is incorrect behavior. It should be treated as
if it were written:
|: ,,, |1,3 ... :|2,4 ... :| ...
I and others would have preferred to write this. The reason we didn't
is that the software rejected it. I've patched abc2ps to accept it.
This wasn't difficult; it took me maybe half an hour. But there's
still a lot of software out there that won't accept it, and as a
result, there's still a lot of ABC that writes it the other way.
The best solution, of course, is to try to get software writers to
make programs accept the extended repeat notation. Once the most
popular programs accept it, only then can we start suggesting to
users that they upgrade their files to use it. And only after they've
(mostly) done so can we decree the 1.6 repeat notation obsolete. This
will probably take a couple of years even if all the software is
upgraded this week.
(Yes, I am well aware that it's a lot harder for player programs. But
it sure would be nice if they'd play my Scandinavian tunes correctly,
and most of them have 4-times repeats. I just did a quick check, and
I still have over 200 tunes that use the |1...:|2...:| notation, even
after converting a lot of them.)
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