[abcusers] BarFly version 1.53 available
There's a new version of BarFly up for grabs at http://www.barfly.dial.pipex.com As usual this is a free update. New stuff: * Recent files menu. * Line number display. * Coda added to list of musical symbols. * Symbol definitions can now be written between exclamation marks or + signs (if you must!). * Preferences for the Analyse Melody command are now persistent. * Plus a few bug fixes. Enjoy! Phil Taylor To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
[abcusers] ABC and MusicXML
Just a reminder ... ABC is not just a computer thing. I know quite a few musicians who can play you the tune from the ABC notation. Also, when I'm in a session and someone plays a tune I'd like to remember, I can simply note down the first few bars in ABC more quickly (and more legibly) in ABC than stave notation. From what is being said on the list, I gather MusicXML would not have this interface to the real world. Also, my sincere thanks to all the enthusiasts who've helped make ABC the great tool that it is. Flos -- Using M2, Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/m2/ To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Exporting to Midi.
there is a bug in Quicktime 6 which causes long notes to be truncated (played staccato) when generating a midi file. [...] so another possible work around is to generate the midi file at a fast tempo to keep all delta times within two bytes, then use a midi editor to change the tempo. Is there a tool for bulk conversion of QT movie files to MIDIs? That would be easier if it existed. No, and if there were it would depend on Quicktime, and would suffer from the same bug as BarFly and Quicktime Player Pro. Could BarFly not do the same thing for you, postprocessing the MIDI files in the same way a human editor would? (I don't know of a cheap or freeware MIDI editor for the Mac, is there one?) - Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760 http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack * food intolerance data recipes, Mac logic fonts, Scots traditional music files, and my CD-ROM Embro, Embro. -- off-list mail to j-c rather than abc at this site, please -- To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC and MusicXML
P J Headford comments: | Just a reminder ... | ABC is not just a computer thing. | I know quite a few musicians who can play you the tune from the ABC | notation. This is worth repeating periodically as a reminder of one of ABC's main features. One example from last year: I got email from someone saying that their daughter wanted to learn a tune for a musical contest, and it was available online, but they were having problems getting software to convert it to readable music. I recommended that she learn to read the ABC directly, and sent a brief description of how ABC works. A day or so later, I got another message saying that she had learned the tune from the ABC and was busy practicing. One of the benefits of any plain-text data format is that you don't necessarily need any fancy tools to read it. Plain text does work against the fancy formatting, fonts, etc. that you can get with more complex tools. But if you just want the information, plain text can be a lot better than the fancier formats. Of course, there's a lot of ABC that's poorly formatted and difficult to read, justasreadingruntogetherEnglishtextwouldbe. But that's not a problem with ABC itself. | Also, when I'm in a session and someone plays a tune I'd like to remember, | I can simply note down the first few bars in ABC more quickly (and more | legibly) in ABC than stave notation. If you look up Chris Walshaw's story on how he invented ABC, you'll see that this was exactly where he started. He was familiar with TeX and MusicTeX, and it occurred to him that a simple translator could turn his alphabetic notation into music notation. The result was abc2mtex. But the original form of ABC was handwritten music. | From what is being said on the list, I gather MusicXML would not have this | interface to the real world. MusicXML is intended as a computer-friendly music notation. It's not at all a replacement or competitor for ABC. The advent of powerful word processor software hasn't eliminated the usefulness of plain-text documents, and it's likely that ABC will continue to be used despite all the powerful music software that's being developed. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC and MusicXML
On Thu, Apr 01, 2004 at 03:33:01PM +, John Chambers wrote: P J Headford comments: | Just a reminder ... | ABC is not just a computer thing. This is worth repeating periodically as a reminder of one of ABC's main features One of the benefits of any plain-text data format is that you don't necessarily need any fancy tools to read it. Plain text does work against the fancy formatting, fonts, etc. that you can get with more complex tools. But if you just want the information, plain text can be a lot better than the fancier formats. | From what is being said on the list, I gather MusicXML would not have this | interface to the real world. MusicXML is intended as a computer-friendly music notation. It's not at all a replacement or competitor for ABC. But it's still plaintext ? You could read it if you had to, but no-one here would want to (by definition. It's an ABC list). Myself included. Verbosity is not considered a drawback they say. Not what we want. As the starter of this thread, I can only point out that I wasn't proposing MusicXML as a competitor or a replacement for ABC, I was proposing it as a complement. ABC is nicer for humans, xml is nicer for machines. Since we do hand our tunes over to computers to do things with, as well as writing them on the backs of envelopes, some things might be nicer for them to do in xml, if we could get the ABC back from it next time we want to interact with it directly. Though, having gone further into investigating this, I'm getting my original enthusiasm into perspective grin. XSLT makes it _really_ easy to parse notes (or anything else) out of musicxml, which is the tricky bit for abc. But having done that, it's not easy to see what you can do with it. Have W3C really given us a toy language with next to no storage ? The only variable type is a scalar, and they can only be assiged to on creation; nor can functions return values. Odd. I think I must be missing some sort of mindset thing. -- Richard Robinson The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes - S. Lem To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC and MusicXML
MusicXML is plain text, just as all the markup languages are, but that doesn't mean you don't have to decode it. Can you decode even simple HTML by just reading it?. MusicXML needs to be read along with the DTD. (By the way, I am slowly adding MusicXML export to HARMONY) Neil At 05:05 PM 4/1/04, you wrote: On Thu, Apr 01, 2004 at 03:33:01PM +, John Chambers wrote: P J Headford comments: | Just a reminder ... | ABC is not just a computer thing. This is worth repeating periodically as a reminder of one of ABC's main features One of the benefits of any plain-text data format is that you don't necessarily need any fancy tools to read it. Plain text does work against the fancy formatting, fonts, etc. that you can get with more complex tools. But if you just want the information, plain text can be a lot better than the fancier formats. | From what is being said on the list, I gather MusicXML would not have this | interface to the real world. MusicXML is intended as a computer-friendly music notation. It's not at all a replacement or competitor for ABC. But it's still plaintext ? You could read it if you had to, but no-one here would want to (by definition. It's an ABC list). Myself included. Verbosity is not considered a drawback they say. Not what we want. As the starter of this thread, I can only point out that I wasn't proposing MusicXML as a competitor or a replacement for ABC, I was proposing it as a complement. ABC is nicer for humans, xml is nicer for machines. Since we do hand our tunes over to computers to do things with, as well as writing them on the backs of envelopes, some things might be nicer for them to do in xml, if we could get the ABC back from it next time we want to interact with it directly. Though, having gone further into investigating this, I'm getting my original enthusiasm into perspective grin. XSLT makes it _really_ easy to parse notes (or anything else) out of musicxml, which is the tricky bit for abc. But having done that, it's not easy to see what you can do with it. Have W3C really given us a toy language with next to no storage ? The only variable type is a scalar, and they can only be assiged to on creation; nor can functions return values. Odd. I think I must be missing some sort of mindset thing. -- Richard Robinson The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes - S. Lem 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
[abcusers] anyone for jim vint?
I'd like to email Jim Vint. Can any kind soul oblige me (off-list)? Thanks, Flos -- Using M2, Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/m2/ To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC and MusicXML
On Thu, Apr 01, 2004 at 06:20:00PM +0100, Neil Jennings wrote: MusicXML is plain text, just as all the markup languages are, but that doesn't mean you don't have to decode it. Can you decode even simple HTML by just reading it?. Sure. Anything can be made hard to read if you have a machine generate it, even ABC. But things are usually easier to read if they're written by hand - html is, for certain. MusicXML needs to be read along with the DTD. ?? Try looking inside one, it's not often hard to see what things mean. -- Richard Robinson The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes - S. Lem To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC and MusicXML
html Neil Jennings writes: blockquote MusicXML is plain text, just as all the markup languages are, but that doesn't mean you don't have to decode it. Can you decode even simple HTML by just reading it?. MusicXML needs to be read along with the DTD. /blockquote p Well, yes, that's technically true. HTML was intended to be a simple, unobtrusive markup that wouldn't interfere with readability. I like to illustrate this by adding HTML to my message, which I'll do now . p But most of the HTML you see in email is utterly unreadable by the typical human. We can expect that most MusicXML will be similar computer gibberish. Neither could be remotely called plain text. p Of course, it's easy to find ABC that's nearly as unreadable. p (Maybe we should refer ABC newbies to Jack Campin for lessons in making readable ABC. ;-) p I hope the list server doesn't strip out this HTML ... /html To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC and MusicXML
On 1 Apr 2004, at 18:39, Richard Robinson wrote: On Thu, Apr 01, 2004 at 06:20:00PM +0100, Neil Jennings wrote: MusicXML is plain text, just as all the markup languages are, but that doesn't mean you don't have to decode it. Can you decode even simple HTML by just reading it?. Sure. Anything can be made hard to read if you have a machine generate it, even ABC. But things are usually easier to read if they're written by hand - html is, for certain. MusicXML needs to be read along with the DTD. ?? Try looking inside one, it's not often hard to see what things mean. No, it's not difficult to understand, in fact you can pretty much guess what most of it means, since everything is labelled. The problem is the sheer volume of text you have to wade through. In abc, each note occupies one or two characters, in MusicXML it occupies half a page. A page of music in MusicXML can take up 100K of text. I found it very difficult to debug my software because I was spending most of my time wading through the MusicXML source looking for the specific construct that was causing the problem. Phil Taylor To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC and MusicXML
With this in mind, I've been struggleing while editing ABC lately. I'm not real good at reading music or ABC on the fly due to learing disability (latent cognition between reading and comprehending). There's a few things that prove to be making reading ABC on the fly a real difficult task. I wonder what other people feel about my stumbling stones. 1. inline chords. Flotsom floating down midstream making navigation difficult. 2. spacing on either side of barlines... this actually is a very helpful deliniation for me... the problem arises with the numbered repeats |1 and :|2... all the programs I've tried only recognize these 'tokens' provided they do not have those spaces I like so much for readability | 1 aBc aBc :| 2 abc abc | anyone else struggle with these? P J Headford comments: | Just a reminder ... | ABC is not just a computer thing. | I know quite a few musicians who can play you the tune from the ABC | notation. This is worth repeating periodically as a reminder of one of ABC's main features. One example from last year: I got email from someone saying that their daughter wanted to learn a tune for a musical contest, and it was available online, but they were having problems getting software to convert it to readable music. I recommended that she learn to read the ABC directly, and sent a brief description of how ABC works. A day or so later, I got another message saying that she had learned the tune from the ABC and was busy practicing. One of the benefits of any plain-text data format is that you don't necessarily need any fancy tools to read it. Plain text does work against the fancy formatting, fonts, etc. that you can get with more complex tools. But if you just want the information, plain text can be a lot better than the fancier formats. Of course, there's a lot of ABC that's poorly formatted and difficult to read, justasreadingruntogetherEnglishtextwouldbe. But that's not a problem with ABC itself. | Also, when I'm in a session and someone plays a tune I'd like to remember, | I can simply note down the first few bars in ABC more quickly (and more | legibly) in ABC than stave notation. If you look up Chris Walshaw's story on how he invented ABC, you'll see that this was exactly where he started. He was familiar with TeX and MusicTeX, and it occurred to him that a simple translator could turn his alphabetic notation into music notation. The result was abc2mtex. But the original form of ABC was handwritten music. | From what is being said on the list, I gather MusicXML would not have this | interface to the real world. MusicXML is intended as a computer-friendly music notation. It's not at all a replacement or competitor for ABC. The advent of powerful word processor software hasn't eliminated the usefulness of plain-text documents, and it's likely that ABC will continue to be used despite all the powerful music software that's being developed. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html -- Christian Marcus Cepel | And the wrens have returned [EMAIL PROTECTED] icq:12384980 | are nesting; In the hollow of 371 Crown Point, Columbia, MO | that oak where his heart once 65203-2202 573.999.2370 | had been; And he lifts up his Computer Support Specialist, Sr. | arms in a blessing; For being University of Missouri - Columbia | born again. --Rich Mullins To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] ABC and MusicXML
On 1 Apr 2004, at 22:19, Christian M. Cepel wrote: With this in mind, I've been struggleing while editing ABC lately. I'm not real good at reading music or ABC on the fly due to learing disability (latent cognition between reading and comprehending). There's a few things that prove to be making reading ABC on the fly a real difficult task. I wonder what other people feel about my stumbling stones. 1. inline chords. Flotsom floating down midstream making navigation difficult. You mean guitar chords? I agree with you. They do interrupt the flow of information. 2. spacing on either side of barlines... this actually is a very helpful deliniation for me... the problem arises with the numbered repeats |1 and :|2... all the programs I've tried only recognize these 'tokens' provided they do not have those spaces I like so much for readability | 1 aBc aBc :| 2 abc abc | Yes. Bar lines are much more visible when they have spaces on either side. I don't have much problem with the numbered repeats though. You can, of course write them as | [1 aBc aBc :| [2 if you really need the space here. (The programs are correct to object to | 1 aBc aBc :| 2 abc abc |, since that's specifically declared illegal in the standard.) Phil Taylor To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
