| Thanks to everybody who have sent me comments and suggestions about the
| abc applications database. On the basis of the feedback so far, I have
| made a number of improvements, and the new updated version lists 53
| programs and scripts (I believe that makes it the largest list of ABC
| applications on Internet). There are a lot more to do, though, so all
| suggestions are still very welcome.
While you're at it, you might add my abc2ps clone to the growing
list. I've called it jcabc2ps for the obvious reason, and it can be
found in:
http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/music/abc/src/
There's a tar.gz file in this directory, and a jcabc2ps subdirectory
where I did the compiles.
It's used by my Tune Finder to convert abc, so I've slowly been
working on making it understand as many of the ABC variants as I can
understand and program. Recently, I added code to do a few useful
things. One is that it understands the middle= clause for clefs that
has been discussed here. This makes it at least possible to define
alternative mappings from ABC's letter notes to dots on the staff. I
have a couple of test files for 4 voices that use the following.
definitions.
V:1 name="soprano" clef=treble middle=B
V:2 name="alto" clef=treble middle=B
V:3 name="tenor" clef=treble-8 middle=B
V:4 name="bass" clef=bass middle=d
This definition draws the little "8" under the clef for the tenor
line, and uses the easy-to-type mapping that puts the plain, unmarked
letters A-Ga-g on the staff for all voices. The "middle=B" is
unnecessary, of course; it's here only for completeness (and to
verify that it works).
The other common scheme is:
V:1 name="soprano" clef=treble middle=B
V:2 name="alto" clef=treble middle=B
V:3 name="tenor" clef=treble-8 middle=B,
V:4 name="bass" clef=bass middle=D,
This draws the clefs but otherwise treats ABC's notes as if they were
treble notes regardless of clef, so you need to use lots of commas in
the tenor and bass lines. It's a pain in the *** to type, but some
people seem to like it.
My code also accepts the other suggested notation:
V:1 name="soprano" clef=treble
V:2 name="alto" clef=treble
V:3 name="tenor" treble,
V:4 name="bass" bass,,
This means the same as the second example, except that the tenor line
doesn't have the little '8', since I'm not sure what the syntax for
that should be in this case.
I also have a test file for the "grand staff" idea, which uses:
V:1 clef=treble middle=b
V:2 clef=bass middle=D
This makes c-g the bottom of the treble staff and C-G the top of the
bass staff. This is sensible for keyboard music. I expect a number of
replies from non-keyboard players of the "Who the hell needs that?"
form. But it works, whether you need it or not.
While I was at it, I added "G", "C" and "F" as alternate names for
the clefs. That was only about three lines of code.
There's still work to be done. At present, nobody seems to use the
"middle=" clause, and the Tune Finder will make bass lines without it
look sorta silly if they use all the commas. One of the next steps is
to add a bit of code to count the commas and lower-case notes, and
make a judgement about which scheme was uses. This should make the
Tune Finder behave more sensibly for random ABC files from the Web.
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