RJP wrote: | On 24 Oct 02 5:16 pm, John Chambers wrote: | > Maybe some day we'll all have full music software on our pocket comm | > gadgets. | A tin whistle / Harmonica in the pocket is easier... (apart from the fluff)
At musical events, I often have a whistle or three tucked into a belt. If people ask about them, I can grab one, hold it like a stiletto, and warn them to not give me any flack about wrong notes. Well, it does get a few grins. Too bad my whistles only know how to play tunes that I know. You'd think that after all these centuries, they could make them smarter. | > to always use fancy music software, the Lilypond and MusicML folks | > are going to give you something much more powerful than ABC. The | > value of ABC is that it's simple, typable, and readable without any | > special software. If we lose that, we will have lost one of the main | > reasons that ABC came into existence in the first place. | | Something like Sibelius is just NOT going to be matched where | complex musical notation is concerned. Don't bet on that. The "Open Source" model is showing a strong record of producing software that radically outperforms commercial products. This is starting to become a real embarrassment to the corporate culture. It's why the Big Guys are starting to use politics and regulation to ensure that only corporate software is permitted. Thus, if things like Lilypond can be blocked by the proposed DRM mechanism, then Sibelius and other "approved" packages will win by default. It's highly likely that the musical amateurs will produce much more useful tools, but you may not be permitted to use them. | What might be useful is an import / export facility for ABC | that could be worth doing I reckon. Yeah. It's basically like the situation with Word Processor software. They are all forced to input and export plain text, no matter how much they'd like to block such text. If I'm selling a commercial package, I'd much prefer that you can only use the files with my software. That way, you (and your friends) have to keep paying me, or your files become unusable. But a plain-text notation like ABC throws a monkey wrench into such plans. If you can write your music as ABC, you can use your files without any special tools at all, and you can import the tunes into a competitor's package. Of course, as with the plain-text vs word-processor debate, ABC lacks most of the fancy music formatting of some other packages. But if we can keep it that way, with "just the music" and a minimum of formatting stuff, then ABC will probably live for a long time, for the same reason that we'll have plain-text files around for a long time despite all the efforts of the Word Processor vendors to discourage or block its use. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
