Dear ABCer's:
Over the past few years several fans of ABC notation
urged me to add the ability to import and export ABC to my
notation software ( MusEdit, http://www.musedit.com ) and I
did that about six months ago. Since then I've been monitoring
the ABC list for new developments in this "language". There are
lots of proposed changes, and once they settle down I'll be
adding the new "standards" to my software (all updates to
MusEdit are free to folks who purchase the program). But I
feel a need to comment on ABC vs. graphical interfaces...
I know that the big advantage of ABC is that it is text-based
and therefore "readable" by anyone, and by a lot of software, and
it's also platform independent. But it sure is nice to use software
which is graphics based for something which is as inherently
graphical as music notation. A good looking musical score can
be as pretty as a calligraphic medieval manuscript, in my opinion.
And although, for example, MusEdit is a Windows program,
it can (like other notation software I suppose) create very nice
looking ".png" (portable network graphics) images which are
cross-platform in the sense that they can be viewed on
Linux, Mac, and PC's, et al.
I've been reading for the past months about whether or not ABC can
handle slides, slash chords, alternate endings, etc. and then reading
about how some of these features are "encoded" into the language...
I must say that after reading about the limitations, or seeing some
of the solutions ( such as: "^f-|f-|f-|_g-|g-|^^e-|e-|^f " ), well, it's a real
treat to simply work with a real, graphical score, and use a couple
of mouse clicks to put in ties, alternate endings, text in different
fonts, chords, a huge vocabulary of different symbols, etc. Maybe
most ABC people do edit their scores with a graphical editor, but
I guess I'm writing this to remind those who don't that for a pretty small
investment (less than $100 for MusEdit and several other notation
packages) you can have the ease and pleasure of working in the
more natural graphical way with your music. And when you
need to you can export / import the music as ABC. It's sad to
see how the nice aesthetic features of a score get stripped away
when you export and then reimport a score through the ABC
language (it's like turning that beautiful medieval manuscript into
a few paragraphs of text in plain courier font), but at least you don't
have to restrict yourself to such bare-bones music all the time
if you have your own graphical editor.
Just a reminder / suggestion...
Doug Rogers
Yowza Software
http://www.musedit.com
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