Jack Campin writes:
| >> A somewhat trickier problem is that there's currently a fair amount
| >> of abc tunes that don't even use the initial repeat on second and
| >> later sections. Some users seems to think that :| is a fine way to
| >> start a repeated section.
| > This is also what many printed sources do, e.g. Kerr's Merry Melodies
| > (as popular as all other Scottish tunebooks put together and then some)
| > and the Northumbrian Pipers' Tunebooks (later numbers of which were
| > typeset with abc2mtex, but I haven't seen those).
...
| I've had a look through my collections and the only ones I can find that
| ever use a begin-repeat sign at the start of a whole tune are Highland
| pipe music books.
Out of curiosity, I'll look through the books on the shelf next to my
desk and see what I find. As a reminder, there are the styles in
question:
Style 0:
... :|
... :|
Style 2:
... :|
|: ... :|
Style 3:
|: ... :|
|: ... :|
Style 4:
... :|:
... :|
(The reason for the numbers should be obvious to any programmer, and
of course you wouldn't expect to find case 1 at all. ;-) Here's what
I find:
Style 0:
Ceol na Fidhle
Kerr (mostly)
Skinner (Harp & Claymore)
O'Neill 1001, 1850
Ryan/Cole
Skye
Walker
Style 2:
Allan's
Carlin
Fraser
Hardie (Caledonian Companion)
Hunter
Kerr
Krassner
Skinner (Scottish Violinist)
Neal, John & WIlliam
O'Neill 1001, 1850
Ryan/Cole (mostly)
Skye (mostly)
Style 3:
Krassner (mostly)
Scots Guards
Style 4:
Carlin
Marshall
Niel Gow
Some had rather low numbers. Marshall, Gow and Skinner didn't use
many repeats, mostly for initial 4-bar repeated phrases. Kerr has low
numbers because the landscape format puts most tunes on one line. Of
those that had significant numbers of repeats, several used more than
one style. Style 4 only appears when there is a pickup at the end of
the line, after the :|: repeat indicator.
I also looked through a number of books of folk tunes from central
and eastern Europe, and was unable to find any examples other than
styles 2 and 3, of which 2 was most common.
My conclusion is that there's no standard for this among printers, at
least in the British Isles and North America. The best advice for
anyone implementing an ABC player would be to expect all of these,
regardless of what any ABC standard might say.
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