Atte: "speed? I think I'm faster in abc than I used to be in encore, but I'm not sure..."
Phil: "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. etc" OUCH! Get Muse! OK - I don't want to knock ABC, but I have to put the other side of the argument. The way that I enter stuff in Muse is typically to use up and down arrow keys to move the cursor up and down the staff and the number keys to control the note length - 4 is a 1/4 note, then 3 is a 1/2 note 2 is twice as long again, likewise 5 is 1/8 etc.) So if I use ^ to represent the cursor up-arrow and v to represent the cursor down arrow, to enter Twinkle Twinkle Little Star I'd type 44^^^^44^44v3v44v44v44v3p The "p" on the end says "play it back to me. After entering each note the cursor moves on a little. To get a dotted note I type a "." (American: period, English: full-stop) after the note. After finding the starting note, the above works in any key. For ABC to write it in A major, I'd have to change it to "G G d d e e d2 c c B B A A G2" into (say) "A A e e f f e2 d d c c B B A2" As each note is entered, the software plays the note to you, so you get immediate feedback that the pitch is correct BY LISTENING, you only need the final playback to check the timing. If you hit a wrong note then Ctrl+<up or down arrow> will drag the note to the next pitch above or below and again, plays the new note as it does so. If the timing is wrong then Ctrl+<right or left arrow> will stretch or shrink it. (e.g. Ctrl+right arrow does 1/8 -> 3/16 -> 1/4 -> 3/8 -> 1/2 etc). Enough said. Long live ABC! I have nothing against it but entering tadpoles by keyboard can be quick too! Laurie To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
