I beg to differ. (Incidentally Scarce Of Tatties is a jig that I rather like - it's in Sue Songer's Portland Collection).
Version 1 - stripped to the bone X:1 K:A Mix A>ee e>fg|e>dB A3:| a>ea a2e |e>dB A3:| is incorrect ABC but can be fixed up by guessing (YES, GUESSING!!) where the two repeats are supposed to go. The "start of tune" one works in this case - but I've seen too many where there are a few lead-in notes at the start of the tune that are not repeated. On these, the guess goes wrong. Some redundancy can be a good thing. Version 2 X:2 K:A Mix A>ee e>fg|e>dB A3:: a>ea a2e |e>dB A3:| is still incorrect, but now there's only one error, i.e. one missing repeat-start. Arguing that O'Neil did it is flawed because as far as I know he never wrote any ABC. Arguing that there is so much ABC out there that does it that it has to be treated as de facto legal, alas, carries the day. This is what it says in the Muse source code: // Algorithm: // Keep count of the number of excess start-repeats. // If we arrive at the end with an excess, close them all // (We could consider doing so as soon as we see a start-repeat // as nested repeats are rare) // We keep track of the last good point to add a repeat and if ever // the count goes negative insert one there. Good points are the beginning // just before the first note or rest and after any repeat-end or double bar, // again just before the first note or rest. Version 3 X:3 K:A Mix |:A>ee e>fg|e>dB A3:| |:a>ea a2e |e>dB A3:| Is correct. It does NOT have an empty bar because :| is not a bar line and nor is |:. The proof of this is that they can occur in the middles of bars. They are something pretty close to double-bars, which can also occur in the middles of bars (I believe the posh word is anacrusis). There seems to be a convention in tadpole land that where a double-bar coincides with a bar line you omit the bar line - that is you draw just two, not three - and I remember wrestling with some interesting ambiguities in the area of bar-length counting and stress-patterns when I wrote that part of Muse. Alas, I cannot now remember what they are. (I think there was (and may still be) a restriction in Barfly that repeats are only allowed at bar boundaries - but I also recall Phil admitting that is a restriction in Barfly caused by a misunderstanding when he wrote it. Laurie ----- Original Message ----- From: Jack Campin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Sunday, December 16, 2001 1:58 AM Subject: Re: [abcusers] Re: Initial repeats > A somewhat trickier problem is that there's currently a fair amount > of abc tunes that don't even use the initial repeat on second and > later sections. Some users seems to think that :| is a fine way to > start a repeated section. This is also what many printed sources do, e.g. Kerr's Merry Melodies (as popular as all other Scottish tunebooks put together and then some) and the Northumbrian Pipers' Tunebooks (later numbers of which were typeset with abc2mtex, but I haven't seen those). It eliminates a bit of pointless visual clutter, which is why I use it. Humans and computers are equally able to work out where the repeat starts without an explicit mark. There is a problem with repeats in the middle of tunes that has never been discussed here as far as I can remember, and is mostly ignored by the 1.6 standard as it only discusses the staff notation generated by repeat signs, not their interpretation as music or the semantic constraints on them. Consider this typical piece of coding: X:1 T:Scarce of Tatties M:6/8 L:1/8 K:A Mix A>ee e>fg|e>dB d>BG|A>ee e>fg|e>dB A3 | a>aa g>ag|f>gf e>AA|A>ee e>fg|e>dB A3:| a>ea a2e |g2f e>AA|a>ea a2e |g>af e3 | e>ee A>AA|d2f f>ee|A>ee e>fg|e>dB A3:| Now this: X:2 T:Scarce of Tatties M:6/8 L:1/8 K:A Mix A>ee e>fg|e>dB d>BG|A>ee e>fg|e>dB A3 | a>aa g>ag|f>gf e>AA|A>ee e>fg|e>dB A3:: a>ea a2e |g2f e>AA|a>ea a2e |g>af e3 | e>ee A>AA|d2f f>ee|A>ee e>fg|e>dB A3:| And this: X:3 T:Scarce of Tatties M:6/8 L:1/8 K:A Mix |:A>ee e>fg|e>dB d>BG|A>ee e>fg|e>dB A3 | a>aa g>ag|f>gf e>AA|A>ee e>fg|e>dB A3:| |:a>ea a2e |g2f e>AA|a>ea a2e |g>af e3 | e>ee A>AA|d2f f>ee|A>ee e>fg|e>dB A3:| Version 1 is the Kerr's/NPTB style I use. In BarFly, version 2 produces a butt-ugly two-sided repeat sign at the end of the second line with the dots floating out in space at the margin; the result is that I never use double-sided repeats unless I know for sure that they're going to be displayed in the middle of a staff line. I like the edge of the staff to form an absolutely definite margin with no bits of notation hanging outside it. Version 3 *should* produce an error warning, as there is an empty bar between lines 3 and 4; this is no different from writing the first two lines as A>ee e>fg|e>dB d>BG|A>ee e>fg|e>dB A3 | |a>aa g>ag|f>gf e>AA|A>ee e>fg|e>dB A3:| which BarFly correctly flags as an attempt to write a bar shorter than the time signature says. (In fact BarFly doesn't see the problem in 3, though according to the 1.6 standard, it should: repeat signs are bars, so the two cases ought to be treated the same way). Also, if you want to reorganize the line breaks, you have to edit the adjacent :| and |: signs into a single :: (after all, :||: is illegal). This is a silly timewaster. If you're changing line breaks you shouldn't be forced to change anything *but* line breaks. The optimal behaviour: write the ABC as in version 2, with a display option in the program to suppress those dangling marginal dots and another option to interpret the :: sign graphically as a closing repeat on one line and an opening repeat on the next. That would decouple the choice of repeat sign from the physical location of its representation in staff notation and allow for all the staff-notation conventions that people have expressed a preference for in this thread. (I thought I'd compare my version of that tune with how other people have represented it. But it turned out that all three copies known to the Tune Finder are mine, which I find astonishing considering how familiar it is). : James is adamant that abc2midi won't play a repeat unless there's : a balanced begin/end. I didn't realize this. I haven't used a current version, since I have nothing that will run it, and I soon gave up on the one included with the old abc4mac (0.95?) because it produced too many spurious warnings. Should I put a warning on my site for people not to use abc2midi on anything there? Almost every tune I've transcribed uses the Kerr's/ NPTB convention, and it *must* be easier for a programmer to modify their code to accept them than for me to change all of them. (And no way in hell am I going to change anything until the software I use gives me the option never to see redundant initial repeats in staff notation made from them). =================== <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> =================== To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
