I haven't had the opportunity to try to encode anything yet, but I look forward to doing so. I'm saving the tons of posts from everyone so I can go back through for hints on various things when I do get to that point.
I have downloaded various things and used abc2Win and whatever behind the scenes tool that runs on one of the sites to create printable sheet music. The minor complaint that I have is that the measures seem to be awefully cramped together. So I have been re-entering the sheet music into a program called MusicTime (I know ... blasphamy!). Is this cramping due to how the tune was originally encoded in abc format or is it just how the formatting tools work under Win98? Platform independence is a good thing for those using UNIX-based and whatever other things the rest of the world might be using (what are you guys in Europe using?), but maybe a bit better formatting tool could be developed for Windows. The note shapes tend to be very "low-res", too. If the graphics-based ones can printout clean-looking sheet music, seems like a formatting tool for abc could do the same thing. I read a few of the posts today talking about how quickly things can be entered in abc text. I can see how that might be true. Yes it takes a ridiculous amount of time to have to use the mouse to go grab the proper duration note each time and some keyboard short-cuts would be very handy for the GUI-based tools. Are there keyboard short-cuts for abc? Will there be if there aren't any now? "weirdPerfect" had all those funny CTRL-xx and ALT-xx things, but in many ways it was faster than MSWord for those of us who learned all the little quirky control strings. Seems to be the same unwritten law for music software as for CAD software ... they just can't seem to get it all right in any one program. There's always one strange quirk that you just want to strangle the author over. A case in point was this very promising shareware thing called Guitar Studio. It has some nice features but it does really stupid things like when you want to cut out the notes in a measure of tablature to re-enter them, it decides to shove all the other measures back into it. And forget trying to get the time signature vs notes per measure to come out right. It absolutely goes berserk with that! For entering tab, it's convenient (well for me in a GUI envirnment anyway) to slap down the notes first, then go back to fix the timing. There's nice little piece of freeware called RandyTab that does a respectable job of entering TAB, but it lacks the slick ability that Guitar Studio had of creating the sheet music simultaneously as you entered TAB. You just can't have it all I guess. I like the little community of abcusers. Seems like you are all really trying to make it a decent tool. I'm sorry I can't contribute much to that effort other than a few suggestions for the wish list. Keep up the good work! Don Parrish-Bell To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
