>And incidentally, was Muse one of the programs that you tried?
Yes, the first programs I tried when I first heard of abc (when I
discovered internet as well) were Muse and Abc2win.
To be honest, I was first reluctant to Muse because of the drawing
of the notes. But I tried it anyway and find there was several
useful options / editing facilities. It can many features,
including transposing (good idea the "transpose, play different
look the same" and conversely) and several more I didn't catch
yet. And it's really efficient to enter notes with it.
But I made a separation between pure abc applications and programs
such as Muse, MusEdit, TablEdit, MusicEase, Stringwalker etc.
which can a bit abc but are not dedicated to it (the fact that
none of the above can edit the abc "source code" denote that, and
they even not have multivoice support, and advanced abc features).
Muse seems to be tablature-oriented and it seems to do that well.
Someone asked one day for a guitar tablature application and I
recommended to try TablEdit and Muse.
Generally speaking, I think the main drawback of Muse is the
display, can't you use true type fonts, like Abc2Win ? There is
certainly domain public musical fonts you could use. It's true the
apparence is not primordial for working on music, but it could be
an advantage to look nicer.
The way of changing options, only in the menu bar, is a bit
frustrating because if you want to configure the guitar tab for
example, you have to go to > options > muse settings > tablature
generation settings > [option to change] several times : if there
was a "pop up" window with all the "tablature generation
settings", you could change this quicker.
To be able to select with the mouse would be better than to select
with < and > (or to have the choise of the two)
About tablatures, I'm using to generate ascii tab a freeware
called PowerTab. It has an efficient feature called Shifter tool
and can "shift string-wise" or "fret-wise", so it's quite quick
and easy to configure several notes as wanted. Muse goes a bit
further in configuration, but it's longer to configure.
There is also something strange. I've guitar partitions (no tab,
only partitions) in abc and I use two voices (or more) because
it's not possible to write chords with different note lengths in
abc (like [E2A2c2e/] and unfortunately nobody seems to complain
about this limitation), so it doesn't work well in Muse if I
import the abc, but it's not the problem if I use a converted midi
file. The problem is the tab should look like this :
Gavotte 1 (R. de Visée)
2/2
||------0---0-|-0-------------|----------5---3-|-1-3-0---0---0-|-0-----||
||o-----1-----|-1--0-3-1----0-|-1--------------|-------------0-|-0----o||
||------2-----|-2------2--1---|-2--2-0---------|-----2-0-----1-|-1-----||
||------2-----|---------------|-2------3---2---|-2-------3---2-|-2-----||
||o-----------|---------------|----------------|---------------|------o||
||------------|---------------|----------------|---------------|-------||
and it can display well in Muse, but after exportation to .tab
ascii file, the chords are now arppegio :
E-------0-|-------=-------0-|-----0-----=---------------|--------
B-----1---|-----=-------=---|---1-----0---3---1---=---0-|--------
G---2-----|---=-------=-----|-2-----=-------2---1---=---|--------
D-2-------|-=-------=-------|---------------------------|--------
A---------|-----------------|---------------------------|--------
E---------|-----------------|---------------------------|--------
----------------5---=---3-|---1---3---0---=---0-------0-|--------
------1-------------------|-------------------------0---|--------
----2---2-0---------------|---------2---0---------1-----|--------
--2---------3-=---2---=---|-2---=-----------3---2-------|--------
--------------------------|-----------------------------|--------
--------------------------|-----------------------------|--------
Maybe I missed an option ?
The = for tied notes are not really relevant in an ascii tab. To
have only the bare tab could be better (or to have the choice to
get rid of the =). In fact it's still possible to replace with a
text editor the = by - o so it's not a real problem. PowerTab is
worse and write the tied notes by repeating the note with the same
in brackets so it's not possible to get rid of them (unless write
a little macro in perl maybe)
>I think I counted that Muse has about 70 shortcuts defined (so
there's heavy
>use of Ctrl+this and Shift+that). It would be a very expert user
that knew
>them all.
It's not a pb is those users know the commands they use most. To
be able to redefine the shortcuts is also a nice feature (for
example I like to use space bar to play / pause if I play fiddle
with the computer, it's easier to strike than the 'p')
There is also no multiple undo (usefull in music editing)
You talked about trying to maintain a download size file close to
300 ko, but I think it's not a burden to download a one mega file,
even with a modem (it takes 5 mins or maybe less) if it's to have
usefull options / facilities or nicer display.
I hope this feedback could help.
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