> Date: Tue, 4 Jun 2002 14:30:37 +0100 > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Phil Taylor) > > Atte wrote: > > >* speed? I think I'm faster in abc than I used to be in encore, but I'm > >not sure... > > When using a graphical music editor to type music in from a score, this > is what you spend most time doing: > > *Look at the score, see that the next note is A and it's 1/8. > *Look back at the screen to locate the note palette. > *Mouse over to the palette and pick up the eighth. > *Mouse back to the staff and click on the second space up. > > When touch-typing abc you don't spend much time looking at the screen, > so the equivalent is: > > *Look at the score, see that the next note is A and it's 1/8. > *Hit the Shift and A keys without taking your eyes off the score. > > No competition. > > Of course if you are entering a tune out of your head the difference > is much less, but even so I think abc has the edge.
Actually, I find that I'm even faster when I'm entering a tune out of my head. In Phil's descriptions above, with a graphical editor, the slow step is dragging the note from the palette to the staff. With abc, the slow step is looking at the score to see what the length and value of the next note are. If I've got a tune already in my head, I can just type the whole thing as I hear it, often at about half speed. In fact, ABC is the only thing I've found so far that's faster for me than a pencil and staff paper. One of the biggest benefits for me is that the tunes are in plain ASCII text, so I can just paste a tune directly into an email message and know that what comes out the other end is human-readable. My mother is a music teacher who has never done anything with abc, but after a couple of sentences describing how to read it (i.e., how note lengths are represented in abc), she can read any snippet of music that I send her. On a not-really related, but amusing note, a friend of mine has a cell phone (sorry, but I don't know which manufacturer) with an undocumented feature that allows her to enter her own tunes for the phone to play when it rings. The syntax is a bare-bones, stripped-down version of abc. Imagine having access to 100,000 tunes (thanks to John Chambers's web bot) to download into your cell phone! Jeff To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
