[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > It might not be safe to assume that MIDI is the only way playback can/will > occur.
Well, yes and no. A non-midi ABC player application should be able to interpret ABC playback commands even though they are named "MIDI", but I can agree the phrasing might be a bit confusing. How about %%PLAY (as Laurie suggested) instead? Provided we want to use the %% syntax in the ABC standard at all, of course. There are two other rather obvious alternatives, either to introduce a special "playback-only" header field (q: would be the obvious choice) or to include the playback-only tempo indications in the Q: field but with some kind of marker that tells a display program not to show this e.g.: Q:Allegro %%1/4=128 or: Q:Allegro [1/4=128] ------- Laurie Griffiths wrote: > > I thought that %%MIDI meant stuff for abc2midi. You're right. But there isn't *necessarily* anything wrong in integrating features from a specific program into the standard. I don't think this would be the first time it happened. That being said, I do feel a bit wary about introducing %% commands to the standard. The syntax is just such a wonderful way for programmers to incorporate their own specialities without being in danger of creating tunes unreadable by other applications. ------- Laura Conrad wrote: > > The point is that you might want to specify a tempo for a MIDI player, > but not print it for a human player. In other words: even if you trust a human musician to be able to pick a sensible tempo for the tune him-/herself, you don't necessarily trust a computer to do so. > > Or to specify a tempo in quarter notes per minute for a MIDI player > but with a word like "allegro" for the human. I thought *that* was supposed to be a separate issue here. OTOH this might be a nice shortcut around lots of parsing problems and complex encoding. You simply put anything you like for a human to read in the Q: field and then allows another separate code to aid a poor computer who has never learned the difference between presto and pesto. Frank Nordberg http://www.musicaviva.com To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
