On 10 Jun 2004, at 16:22, Steve Wyrick wrote:
Phil Taylor said:
Steve, I think you should suggest to your friends that they get
abcm2ps; it's
much more up to date, is still being developed and there are versions
for
all three major platforms. You might want to look at it yourself too,
as
you can invoke it directly from BarFly to get a nice GUI. There are
instructions for this in the Import/Export doc which comes with BarFly.
Thanks Phil, I'll look into it, and suggest it to anyone who asks.
Unfortunately, the majority of the people I interact with who use abc just
dump it into the concertina.net tune-o-tron
(http://www.concertina.net/tunes_convert.html), which uses abc2ps,
abc2midi and ghostscript; or download tunes from JC's ABC Tunefinder as
pdf files (John, does your site also use abc2ps as an intermediate step in
going to pdf? What about the MIDI generator?). Since I planned to post
this transcription I was looking for a format that even the dumbest abc
translator could read! It's frustrating having to deal with the situation
where the most-used program isn't the best one! -Steve
There used to be at least one other abc to staff notation converter on the
web at <http://www.fojar.com/~steve/abctostaff/index.php> but that just gave me
a 404, and www.fojar.com gives a message which says "Moving day", so maybe it
will be back. It might be worth contacting the owners of concertina.net and
asking them to change it to use abcm2ps. It would be a trivial job, as the
interface is identical, and it would make no difference to simple tunes.
As another alternative, perhaps Jon Freeman could consider adding a tune
converter to FolkInfo? As he is already using abcm2ps to convert tunes from
the FolkInfo database on the fly it might not be too difficult.
Phil Taylor
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