abc notation - an introduction

Thiru

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Hello,

I thought you might be interested on abc notation. This is from http://abcplus.sourceforge.net/abcplus_en-2016-05-19.pdf

Many text-based notations have been invented. ABC, introduced by Chris Walshaw in 1991, is one of the best available: being simple, easy to learn yet very powerful, it has gained widespread popularity. Thousands of tunes written in ABC are available on the Internet: in fact, this notation is the de facto standard among folk musicians. The ABC home page is http://abcnotation.com. ABC was later expanded to provide multiple voices (polyphony), page layout details, and MIDI commands. This is a major release of the ABC notation, and has been called ABC 2: its formal description is available at http://abcnotation.com/wiki/abc:standard:v2.2. A few programs implement most ABC 2 features and provide some extensions, which in turn may become part of the ABC standard in the future. The purpose of this guide is to introduce the reader to ABC 2 and the most important features of its related programs. Ideally, people who could benefit from this manual are:

• folk musicians who would like to learn as little ABC as necessary to understand the files they find on the net. These people can skip the part about harmony, and probably do not need to study this guide thoroughly;

• classical musicians who would like to use ABC 2 for typesetting their scores.
Inbothcases,ifyouwishtoprintsheetmusicforyourchoirorband,ormakeasongbook, or perhaps just teach music, you have found the right tool. Besides, it’s free! The ABC 2 home page is
http://abcplus.sourceforge.net.
 
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administrator

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yes - very useful. We need to think about incorporating this in our forums.
 

Thiru

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I thought some of you would be interested

(Copy of https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/abcusers/conversations/messages/14903 )
In case anyone would like to check it out, I've released a new version of abc2sn. There are a lot of "big" and little things:
  • A redesigned user interface using the w2ui.com framework.
  • Ability to upload/download files from Dropbox. I think this is pretty cool, and definitely makes it more usable from a mobile device.
  • Responsive design that hopefully presents a usable interface on just about any screen size. Let me know if you have issues, I have a limited number of devices, but I got a kick out of seeing it work on my iPhone.
  • An experimental implementation of the guitar "leadsheet" utility that Jef wrote. Press on the "guitar" icon and the leadsheet will be appended to the output by tacking on %%text statements.
  • An experimental tab structure that provides additional information/output. Click on the [<-->] expand icon, and additional tabs will appear. The "preface" area shows the shape note glyphs (try looking at the tab and alternating between [7] and [N] shapes.) Similarly, look at the "epilog" area tab and observe it as you press the guitar tab for "leadsheet" on and off. The "include area" does not currently do anything, but I'm open for suggestion.
  • A "status message" area at the bottom that gives feedback on operations, and will also open up when clicked to show recent status messages. (try entering some wrong notes and watch the message area.)
  • A "print" icon for convenience to invoke the browser print dialog.
The previous options are also there:
  • Ability to upload/download files to the local computer (although by design the HTML5 standard keeps saving files restricted to the download folder as defined by your browser.) (Thanks Jef! :)
  • Play, Pause, Resume, Stop music.
  • Selection of which voice(s) to play
  • Ability to move the output to a separate window. Handy when you have multiple monitors.
  • A few samples for a "quick" start to show friends and family.
  • Selectable automatic or manual rendering. Handy for those times when you are entering a lot of data.
I haven't removed the old version, as I'll have to update the graphics on my instructables.com instructions.

I also haven't minimized the files, so you may get a "this web site is not responding message." I'll optimize it after I see if I messed anything up too badly.

If you get a chance to look at it, I'd appreciate any feedback. Here is the url:

http://www.projectnotions.com/abc2shapenote/abc2sn-2.0.html
http://www.projectnotions.com/abc2shapenote/abc2sn-2.0.html
I disabled the midi button for now, but I think it should be "straightforward" to use one of Jef's utilities for generating and saving a midi file.

Thanks again Jef for the great program.

Ken
 

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