[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > At 06:37 PM 3/6/02, Richard Robinson wrote:>On Wed, 6 Mar 2002, Jack Campin wrote: > > > > I wonder, if at some point in the future, the committe who establishes > > > the abc standard might not consider an alternative to ascii text as a > > > file format. I know on first glance there are those who will shudder and > > > scream, but why not. If a standard was created that could not be edited > > > in a text editor, these problems go away. Filesize could still be kept > > > down. The only concession would be that all editing would have to be > > > done inside an 'abc' editor. > >and then a huge amount of abc usage would go away, too. Many people see it >as one of the most useful things about abc, that it can be edited using >.
This is absolutely a primary advantage of ABC... Otherwise, standard notation programs work just fine for 'archiving' music. The associated issue of file size is almost academic anymore given the size of the modern hard drive. Anyway, *please* keep ASCII. ================= Yes, please don't fix something that ain't broke! I use NEdit on my Linux box to edit ABCs. I have highlighting set up for ABC in it. I primarily use abc2ps to create the standard notation. I *DO NOT* want to *have* to use some ABC editor and be on whatever computer I have that on to do it. Right now I can edit an ABC file on any text editor on any computer without spending extra $$. If a "standard" to use only a new format tha thas to be written using a new dedicated ABC editor, I, for one, *won't* use it. I'll stay with NEdit and abc2ps, and I suspect there are many more out there like me. I have been involved in assisting a friend in teaching an introduction to ABC at Hammered Dulcimer festivals (I have the laptop ;-) ), and one of the great values of ABC is that these mostly non-technical types like the ease and simplicity of writing ABC. And if it is required to use a dedicated editor, I think at least some of the attraction to using it will go away. We already have, as has been pointed out, dedicated format notation programs out there. But I have Cakewalk for a sequencer in which I *could* do tunes, and also an old DOS program called MusicPrinterPlus, but most of my friends don't have Cakewalk or MPP. And to buy a program that gives one the ability to save the notation in a format that can be read by anyone, one has to spend several hundred dollars. So, ABC fills a definite need for those of us who don't want to have to go out and spend hundreds of dollars to send tunes to our friends. Besides, hasn't anything been learned from Microsoft? ;-) My USD.02. ;-) Rick To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
