Jeff Bigler writes: | > And in my copious spare time, I'll try to fill in more rows for all | > the wonderful feechurz that people are implementing. There is a bit | > of a problem with trying to collect such info. There isn't enough | > time for one person to gather all the programs and test them all, at | > least not if you intend to spend any time playing music. | | Could you please add a section for !command!, as described in the draft | proposed 1.7.6 standard? (Or is the document at | http://www.gre.ac.uk/~c.walshaw/abc/abc-draft.txt no longer under | consideration?) I'm particularly interested in dynamics and their | associated markings (crescendo, diminuendo, etc.), and I'm not aware of | any existing abc-to-anything-else program that deals with them. (And | I'm not enough of a programmer to write my own!) As a classical | musician who occasionally plays folk, I personally find the absence of | dynamics to be ABC's biggest limitation.
Yeah; I oughta do that. I've been thinking of generally merging in all the new and proposed extensions. It does take time to do such things, but it's probably worthwhile. The abc2ps clones do implement some of these things. Probably the most advanced (in some respects) is abcm2ps, Jeff Moine's clone. He also implements multiple parts on a single staff. I've been thinking of trying to merge his code with mine (jcabc2ps), which implements some different features such as extended endings and explicit key signatures. But this does take time. | As an aside, I play a lot of late-20th-century (and 21st-century) | classical music. There are several unusual notations that have come | into usage since the 1950s that are not (yet) implemented in ABC. I | could mention them on this list as I run across them, if there's | interest. I haven't, largely because the bother-to-worth ratio seems | too high--these would serve a very small subset of the ABC community, | and some of the notations would be difficult to define or implement in a | plain-text system. That is a problem. One of the ongoing quandaries with ABC is whether it should be extended to handle more types of music, or whether it would be better to just start all over with a more powerful notation. The latter has been done by the lilypond people, of course, and the MusicML people are working on solving all the world's music notation problems. What will probably happen is something in between. Things that aren't too hard to do within ABC's plain-text form will probably happen as implementers see the need. ABC has large enough user base to make this worthwhile. There are some fancy commercial packages that will do a lot more. But these do tend to have the problems of commercial packages: They use a proprietary format, and the files can only be exchanged with others who use the same software. I'd guess that music publishers are quite envious of this. Imagine if, when you bought a published piece of music on paper, you couldn't mail it to someone else because they wouldn't be able to read it on their music stand. Nobody has ever been able to do this with paper, but they can with computer files. Anyway, I'd suggest posting a few tentative messages on this list. Maybe there are other ABC users who would be interested. There are a lot of users who find ABC limiting and who would like to see it made more capable. Of course, to make things happen, you need to get a few programmers interested. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
