Richard Robinson writes: | On Wed, Jul 30, 2003 at 09:38:29AM +0100, Bernard Hill wrote: | > | One possible counter-argument would be, that if ABC was able to express | things that no other software can, just imagine the explosion of | usefulness. Tunes might start turning up containing information that | people previously didn't have any way of expressing. | | "Some people believe this has already happened", to borrow from Douglas | Adams.
Indeed. I've tried a lot of commercial music packages, and what I like to do is to attempt to type in a song like "Jovano, Jovanke". Now, most people in the international dance crowd will know this song, and probably most randomly-chosed Serbian 8-year-olds could sing it to you. But it wants a meter of 7/8 and a key signature that (in D) has two flats and one sharp. Both completely normal, simple, everyday rhythm and scale in that part of the world. Almost every music package that I've tried this on flunks badly. When I first ran across abc, I was quite impressed by the fact that it (abc2ps actually) accepted M:7/8 without complaint and did the Right Thing. When I tried M:4+3+4/16, it also did exactly what I wanted it to do. The K:<tonic><mode> obviously couldn't handle the scale. But you can use the short-term kludge of K:Dphr with ^F wherever you need it, and the program's source was freely available. So I could fix this. This was a strong argument in favor of abc against all those feeble commercial packages. The real clincher was that I could email abc tunes to friends. If I can't email tunes to friends or put the tunes on my web site for anyone do use, why would I bother? But abc was plain text, you didn't actually need any software other than a text editor. And there were abc tools for at least the most common computers. The unix software I could get in source form and compile myself. Wow! The very fact that M:7/8 worked correctly was a powerful argument for finally trying some of this computerized music stuff. Someone finally had a clue about something beyond the narrow range of a small corner of the world's music. And with "open source" software, the path to the rest of the world's music was obvious. It didn't surprise me in the least when abc web sites started showing up. It doesn't surprise me now to see that abc is the only common music notation on the Net. (I do think abc could use some competition, though. When are we going to see some big Lilypond or MusicML web sites?) To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
