Re: [abcusers] abc compliant software

[Bryancreer]

I had planned to watch this thread for a while before adding my thoughts but
now there is so much to respond to that it's hard to know where to start so
here are a few random hits -

John Chambers said -

>Just a few days ago, I was asked why  www.irishtunes.net  isn't  very
>well  represented in the tune finder's indexes.  There are actually a
>few of their files included, but many of them aren't.  I spent a  fun
>hour  or  so  just  yesterday  looking around the site, and was truly
>impressed  by  how  badly  someone   can   mangle   abc,   apparently
>intentionally.  It's like they studied a number of abc tools with the
>goal of producing abc that wouldn't work with any of them.

Did it occur to you, John, as an experienced and knowledgeable abc user and
member of the standards committee, that it might have been more constructive
to offer some helpful advice rather than slagging them off as wilfully
incompetent?  Perhaps the fact that they use and endorse abc2win puts them
beyond the pale.

John Chambers and Phil Taylor produce statistics to prove that abc2win is a
minor player in the field and yet John says -

>Again, the big problem is the abc2win tunes

and

>In the meantime, Chris's 1.6 "standard" is what we have, and  abc2win
>violates it in numerous ways. This could be fixed, if someone were to
>volunteer to do it, though it would mean a bit of work  converting  a
>few  thousand  old  abc2win files.  

John also says -

>I sure do wish we could get abc2win in line with the  standard.   

Well you could start off by being polite to Jim Vint and making him feel a
bit more welcome within the abc community (I wouldn't mind that myself).

I agree that there are some irritating deviations from the standard in
abc2win but they are documented and consistent so they can be worked round
without too much trouble.

Yes, it is true that www.irishnet.com makes a bit of a pigs ear of the
individually displayed tunes but I downloaded the whole collection and it
only gave me one significant problem, an M: 6/8 command imbedded in the tune.
 There shouldn't be a space after the :.  So abc2win's error checking isn't
perfect.  I've never come across this error before.

The antagonism towards abc2win seems totally out of proportion to any
problems it causes.  Could people be just a little bit jealous of its success?

It seems a little strange that, given the reactions to Gianni's description
of abc2win as the de facto standard, nobody raised even a whisper of protest
when Wil Macaulay said -

>if you write your abc/Noteworthy converter to use a version of abc
>that is not in the 1.6 standard (I'm not even talking about 1.7 extensions
here)
>you will be creating tunes that are not readable by abc2win, which is the
>most common abc platform for windows. Bad move.

(Not that I'd ever considered doing anything of the sort.)

Again, from John Chambers -

>One of our problems  is  trying  to  keep  abc  from  splitting  into
>incompatible branches.  We do have branches, but so far abc2win seems
>to be the only one with  significant  incompatibilities.   

Interesting, then, that, in reply to Hartmut Wiechern's problems with
Personent Hodie, Frank Nordberg said -

>Use the only second of the two ABCs. The first of them is specially
>formatted for BarFly, the second one for abc2ps/abc2midi.

>It's a clumsy way around the present ABC incompatibility problems, but
>it seems to be necessary with music as comples as Personent Hodie

ABC's great strength is as a means of communication between musicians
regardless of race, colour, creed, religious affiliation, hardware, operating
system or software preference but do many of the developers care or are they
only interested in their own "extensions to"/"gratuitous violations of" the
standard regardless of the affect on anybody else?

Advertising feature -
To see whether your ABCs conform to the standard, try ABCcheck.
Even if you are not interested in Noteworthy, ABC2NWC can be used to clean up
your collections by converting to nwc format and back again since it is,
indeed, liberal in what it accepts and conservative in what it produces.

Both available from -
http://members.aol.com/abacusmusic/ (Windows only, I'm afraid)

Happy music making.

Bryan Creer

PS.  I notice that there has been a little flurry of unsuscribes lately.  I
wonder why.