Am Samstag, 13. April 2002 00:00 schrieb Doug Rogers/Yowza Software: > I know that the big advantage of ABC is that it is text-based > and therefore "readable" by anyone, and by a lot of software, and > it's also platform independent. But it sure is nice to use software > which is graphics based for something which is as inherently > graphical as music notation. A good looking musical score can > be as pretty as a calligraphic medieval manuscript, in my opinion. > And although, for example, MusEdit is a Windows program, > it can (like other notation software I suppose) create very nice > looking ".png" (portable network graphics) images which are > cross-platform in the sense that they can be viewed on > Linux, Mac, and PC's, et al. > > I've been reading for the past months about whether or not ABC can > handle slides, slash chords, alternate endings, etc. and then reading > about how some of these features are "encoded" into the language... > I must say that after reading about the limitations, or seeing some > of the solutions ( such as: "^f-|f-|f-|_g-|g-|^^e-|e-|^f " ), well, it's a > real treat to simply work with a real, graphical score, and use a couple of > mouse clicks to put in ties, alternate endings, text in different fonts, > chords, a huge vocabulary of different symbols, etc. Maybe most ABC people > do edit their scores with a graphical editor, but
You are perfectly right. For someone who wants to write a real beautiful peace of musical score and who enjoys looking at it afterwards it will probably be a good idea of using another note editing system than just a plain old editor with which you can write some letters and signs. For those people it is very desirable to be able to buy a good quality software for a reasonable cost. I personally do not enjoy looking at musical notes, for me they are a necessary evil. When I learn a new peace of music I sit down and write down the notes and the chords from an MP3 file. I can have the editor and the MP3 player on one single screen. When I have written down everything there is to write I convert it with abc2ps and see what I have done wrong. Mostly there are 2 or 3 places where a tone happened to be written in the wrong octave and that's it. You can actually become a very good abc-writer once you get used to it. Since I never look at the keyboard when I write I can enter all notes with the left hand (abcdefg and z are all left) and just use the right shift key to discriminate the main octaves - and the signs (,'-| etc.) with the right hand (Danish keyboard) and it goes pretty fast. Abc2ps gives a very nice looking sheet which can afterwards become converted to pdf with ps2pdf. I have noticed that this results in relatively small files suitable for emailing to the other band members who can print them out even if they for some reason still happen to have Windows on their computers. If you have a lot of notes to write then this is one of the fastest ways there exists. Since I don't care to write out every small 16th syncope etc. I just write a course representation of the melody good enough to show what it's all about. Abc is very very productive in that you can write a huge number of notes in a short time and don't care what it will look like afterwards. You can be sure that when you use abc2ps then at least it won't be ugly and that's good enough for me. Still I agree with your viewpoints. Both is needed. Ulf To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
