I've been off sailing. Let me try (below) to clear up the tempo thread for the last week. Do we have a concensus? Can we adopt this yet?
Laurie Jack Campin: One extra thing you get in actual scores: multiple names for the same tempo, which in your notation might be Q:allegro=>Tempo I Laurie: I am not in favour of this. The more levels of indirection the trickier it is to follow what's intended. So you'd have to do a little more writing. For instance: Q:120=>allegro Q:120=>Tempo I Jack Campin: I am not sure what your proposal does about leading and trailing spaces in tempo names Laurie: You can put leading and/or trailing spaces where you define them or use them but they are not part of the name. Thus: (the trailing spaces are not so obvious) Q:120=> Allegro Q:145 =>a little too fast Q:allegro Q: A little too fast is legal, but Q: a little too fast would not be recognised as the same. (That's should simplify implementation). John (jhoerr) Does this mean that a transcriber can't specify a tempo without also defining it metronomically? Laurie: That depends on the program. For a player program one might get a warning to the effect that it is going to play it at a default tempo because it doesn't understand the given tempo. For a printing-only program one might get no complaint. From a syntax checker one probably should get a warning. John Walsh: how do you ask it *not* to print the tempo? Laurie: That's a program dependent thing. The ABC defines what the music means, not what a program is to do with it. Obvious possibilities include: %%nifty NO_TEMPO_PRINTING Q:Allegro C:> Nifty MyTune.abc /NewStandard /NoTempoPrinting Bring down Options menu then Printing then ABC then Tempo and remove the checkmark. Simon Wascher: It *must* be possible to use words for describing tempo whithout having to define them in numbers. Laurie: Same as jhoerr's objection. A player program *must* either guess or give up in these circumstances and *may* choose to warn/complain/throw a fit. A non-playing program may be quite happy. (Please don't kill yourself!) To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
