Gianni Cunich wrote:
>It's plain to see that the total lack of cooperation among the
>developers subscribing to this list has a lot to do with this,
>although I don't think there's anything we could do about it at this
>stage. If anybody still believes the abc notation could be taken in
>serious consideration outside the folk circles, the best for him.
>IMO, the endless debate on the sex of angels that has being going on
>this list for the past four years, and that has made any update of
>the standard impossible so far, was what actually gave it the kiss
>of death. How long those who are responsible for the notation demise
>will need to face this basic thruth is of course their own
>problem... not mine!
I don't think the facts bear out what you are saying here Gianni.
Over the last four years the popularity of abc has increased enormously.
A few days ago I dug out all of John Chambers reports on his web crawler's
results and plotted the estimated number of tunes on the web against
time. You can see the results at:
http://rbu01.ed-rbu.mrc.ac.uk/abcstats.gif
(Bear in mind John's own reservations about the accuracy of this data>)
The number of tunes on the web has grown in a consistent logarithmic
fashion for the last four years. Add to that the fact that the abc
home page gets the top rating of any music notation site on Google
and you conclude that despite all evidence to the contrary we must
have been doing something right.
>What makes me feel sick (those who have read my last postings kown
>its my pavlovian reaction when I start discussing about the abc
>notation) is that, while we have been throwing away the baby with
>the bath water, someone else has built in concrete on Chris
>Walshaw's original intuition to create some excellent software.
>
>If you wish a nice example of what I mean, have a look at this web site:
>
>http://www.zelsoftware.com/
>
>Zel, in fact, it's described as a language to create midi files from
>a text file, eventually to load them in a sequencer for further
>editing.. Everybody, having a look at the quick tutor on the site
>(the page is called Learn Zel in 10 minutes), will be able to see
>how much it has in common with the abc notation.
>
Zel is a commercial product controlled by one person, who can change the
format in any way he wants. It is _very_ midi orientated, making no
concessions whatsoever to music notation. So, as far as I can see,
it has no way of representing beams, slurs or repeats. It is much more
sophisticated than abc when it comes to generating midi (but then that's
a relatively minor part of what abc is about). Zel (the program) is
only available for one platform (windows). Zel files can hold only
one tune, and since Zel tunes have no defined start or end markers
you cannot embed them in ordinary text as you can for abc. While there
are around 100 K abc tunes on the web, there are about a dozen in Zel
format.
These are conclusions reached after about fifteen minutes reading the
Zel site, and my not be entirely accurate, but even so it's no contest.
Phil Taylor
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