Richard Robinson wrote: | On Tue, 23 Apr 2002, John Chambers wrote: | > Of course, there's a very real fear that once something gets into a | > standard, there will be social pressure to implement it. ;-) | | <laughter, offstage>
Yeah, but note that some people are pretty good at resisting such social pressure. Who was it that compared managing programmers to herding cats? | if I could digress a little for a minute (without altogether dropping the | topic of standards) ... your Tune Finder, if asked for midi :- is this | equivalent to doing abc2midi on the abc for myself, or do you do any | pre-processing ? I ask because I see that your abc2ps knows more about | abc2win than other versions do ... I'm still wrestling, on and off, with | the (mostly abc2win) tunes out of VMP, and would like to check (or improve | on) my hand-edited/perl-mangled versions. It's true that my [jc]abc2ps has some kludgery to recognize the abc2win use of '!' and handle it. Actually, "handle" in this case pretty much means "ignore". But it also tries to recognize at least some of the !foo! thingies that have been proposed for ornaments and other annotations. These two uses are somewhat in conflict. The code basically looks for white space after a '!', and if any is found before the next '!', or if it hits the end of the line, it's treated as an abc2win use and dropped. If '!' occurs twice without any white space it's an annotation. These are either translated to the ornament or displayed as text. I oughta work on this some more. OTOH, if you ask for MIDI, there's no real preprocessing. The tune may be cut out of the file (unless the index is zero), but it is just fed to abc2midi and the result is sent to the client as audio/midi. There are a lot of things that my abc2ps clone handles but abc2midi doesn't. Some of my Balkan tunes come out sounding sorta funny as a result. That's "funny" as in not very Balkan, and sometimes converted to that bizarre western "major" scale. Maybe some day that'll get fixed, too. But the '!' that abc2win uses probably doesn't confuse abc2midi, because this is staff-end notation, and a player should just ignore such things. I'm not actually very clear on just what abc2win's syntax really is. >From the questions I've gotten, I get the feeling that it confuses a lot of other people, too. It's probably something simple, but you can't infer the meaning from the abc. I just coded something that turns this abc into something that "works". To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
