I wonder, if at some point in the future, the committe who establishes
the abc standard might not consider an alternative to ascii text as a
file format. I know on first glance there are those who will shudder and
scream, but why not. If a standard was created that could not be edited
in a
Is there an application to reduce accidentals (i.e. change __a to =g)?
I know that double sharps and double flats exists to be used but
sometimes it's easier to read music without them.
BarFly's search and replace can do that, if you really want to.
However there is nothing in the ABC spec
Probably what they're doing is trying to trick people into signing
up for their service.
It looked to me like another of those we're the sysadmins so send
us your password scams - they're trying to hijack ICQ accounts.
Same general procedure as the Nigerian bank account hackers.
Quite what
Anybody got an ABC for the Do not forsake me, oh my darling
theme tune from High Noon?
Our folk club is having a morning, noon and night theme night
shortly and that's the obvious one to put in the middle of my set,
except I can only remember bits of it and don't have a recording.
sacrilege
A chord sequence written A E/A D/A A means something very
clear to me *exactly* as written.
I'm *guessing* it means
[Acea] [A,EGBe] [A,DFAd] [Acea]
in a key signature of three sharps, but should I (or a piece
of software generating such an expansion) have to guess?
Do you object to
[ disentangled mess from Laurie - can't you get that mail
client to stop top-posting and quoting everything? ]
I need a good strathspey to play on the fiddle in the key of
B flat major.
Transpose whatever strathspey you like into the key of Bb?
Yes - but then you have to mess about with it
can [ABC2Win] handle in-line fields, in particular metre changes?
Yes, done that; meter and key change can appear in the length of
a stave line, but the K: M: L: fields must be at the left margin,
and preferably in that order.
I meant in-line in the ABC itself, like this (acceptable to all
I've also been contemplating solving the need for random text such as
last time under an ending bracket. This obviously needs quotes, and
has syntax problems after a bar line. What I think would work is to
say that you must use the '[' in this case, and you can then write
|: CEC DED |1-3
[ABCMus auto-harmonization] has a cute feature which is fun to play
with: it allows you to adjust a strangeness factor--the higher the
strangeness factor, the stranger the chords it sets. And they can
be pretty strange, indeed...
Yes, but even if you set strangeness in AbcMus to 100% at
I've uploaded a new version of the modes tutorial on my website
(see the URL below). Let me know of any problems?
=== http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/ ===
To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
About converting abc to eps files, or other image format, you
should use pdf instead because most users have access to a pdf
reader (gv, acrobat, xpdf etc.). Postcript files are not easily
readable by windows users who don't have ghostscript (=most of
them).
Which version of Acrobat? They
without sending some of them off on a trawl
across the entire Web looking for ABC files that might be convertible
into invoices. At some point that's going to happen anyway but we better
be prepared for it.
-
Jack Campin
How does different platforms handle tarballs anyways? (You did did find
the slightly hidden (at the bottom of the songs page) tarball with all
tunes in abc, right?)
I used two programs in succession: Stuffit Expander and then Tar (a Mac
port of the Unix utility). The problem was that Tar
Maybe it's time to again consider having the list software block
messages from non-subscribers.
I thought it already did and that the Turkish spammers were doing
something unusually sneaky... if not, then the time must have come,
as it only takes one huge binary to knacker a whole list.
Is it possible to compile and use abcm2ps on a mac ?
Assuming it's a fairly conventional workstation Unix program:
Getting it to run under MPW (Apple's development environment, with
a sort of shell for running software developed under Unix) might
not be too hard, except that (a) MPW has a
In piobaireachd, a section which plays
| AA | AA | BB | AA | BB | BB | AA | BB ||
is generally put on the page as
|:: [twice first time AA] | [twice second time BB] ::|
i.e.
|:: [1x2,2,3 AA] | [1,2x2,3 BB] ::|
I don't understand how either the second or third represent the first.
BUT, I am very excited by the proposal that ends of sections be
markable with ']' because this is necessary to get away from the idea
that conditional material only occurs at the *ends* of repeated
sections. There are quite a few Highland pipe tunes in which a single
bar in the middle of
Is this odd enough in the slurs department?
X:1
T:Yammil Abaya
T:Lovely Maiden
O:Iraq
B:Charles Haywood, Folk Songs of the World (1966)
[Barfly's interpretation of Haywood's chords...]
Doubtless that was what Haywood meant, but it's not exactly a stellar
piece of arranging, is it?
I think abc's biggest shortcomming is the fundamental of only
being able to put a chord where there is a melody-note. I consider this a
major bummer, and guess everybody (except me) writes stuff like
| A AmC4 |
if your software supports non-printing rests (BarFly, Skink) you can write
|
lack of a way to notate non-classical key signatures.
Over the five year history of BarFly, I've had exactly one request from
a user for more complex repeat structures and nobody has ever asked for
global accidentals to be rolled into the key signature rather than
placed on the individual
to use. Has anybody hacked abc2mtex to deal with stuff
like multiple voices or text underlay?
-
Jack Campin * 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU, Scotland
tel 0131 660 4760 * fax 0870 055 4975 * http
East Side Journal reports that without telling anyone, Microsoft
has suddenly changed the privacy preferences for all Hotmail users.
They're now sharing your name and other personal information with
third parties, even if you said you didn't want that when you
signed up. (If
First, one further suggestion: Is there a way to make it clear in the
email headers what address the list sent a message to? In looking
over the headers for Atte's message, I do see my own address, but
only in the lines that appear to be generated by this machine's email
software.
Is there some abc software for percussion notation?
Except for standard stuff like the Xs or other strange symbols
for cymbals, etc. and except for rolls, I'm not sure there is
anything you couldn't notate with standard ABC. Maybe there's
something I'm forgetting.
Which hand whacks what
to try to notate something like Varese's Ionization, but locating
the Quicktime codes for all the instruments it needs seems to be
impossible, even though they are probably all in there somewhere).
-
Jack Campin * 11
I asked the guy who supplied me with this about the single line system,
and he said that he couldn't think of any serious application for
that.
Modern Scottish snare drumming and the Swiss Basel style from which it
derives both use the single-line system which Jack Campin described. See
between tieing and slurring on to the first note of a triplet, and your
suggested change would preclude that.
-
Jack Campin * 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU, Scotland
tel 0131 660 4760 * fax 0870 055
Would you want to use a non-printing rest in a drum part?
Yes, perhaps even more than in other music - about the commonest
pattern you get is alternating rests in one hand against notes
in the other, and often the rests are left implicit.
I've wondered if a better solution might be
to have
Another thing that already has precedent in abc is a staff with other
than 5 lines. Someone (I wonder who ;-) has already implemented the
medieval 4-line staff. This could be generalized easily within abc,
by something like clef=perc lines=2. The lines= clause would be
generally useful
is that
the early, sloppy efforts get left behind - is there *any* tune out
there using + for chords that we need to preserve?)
-
Jack Campin * 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU, Scotland
tel 0131 660 4760 * fax
and four for the
others).
-
Jack Campin * 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU, Scotland
tel 0131 660 4760 * fax 0870 055 4975 * http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/
food intolerance data recipes, freeware
You have to put each P: field in all of the voices if you want
to control playing order.
Same goes for M: and K: fields (assuming that you want all the
voices to change metre and key at the same point).
The latter pair is actually useful for some picese.
Yes, even Bach did it. One of the
It would look damn silly to have
Scherzo or other section marker repeated in every single voice;
you can't use Scherzo to control part order - you've got
to use 'A'..'Z' as specified in the standard which you quote above.
That's a limitation which should have been fixed long ago. One of the
HP Hp are scale specific rather than instrument specific. You can
play a pipe tune on a fiddle provided you know what the pipe mode is.
Fair enough. Can you point me to any documentation and/or examples of
their use?
Look at the pipe tunes in my Dalkeith music page:
...
-
Jack Campin * 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU, Scotland
tel 0131 660 4760 * fax 0870 055 4975 * http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/
food intolerance data recipes, freeware Mac logic fonts
Version 1.0a5 June 19 2002
New Features and Bugfixes
- !xxx! text fields parse and display as text
Aaargh... does that mean it will fail on almost all abc2win files?
What's the problem with simply getting the user to search-replace
those ! signs with quotes? There's a hell of a lot more ABC
the basename from that line (again, tough if those lines aren't
unique).
-
Jack Campin * 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU, Scotland
tel 0131 660 4760 * fax 0870 055 4975 * http://www.purr.demon.co.uk
:! We need:
:! * transposition (which understands the mode of what's being
:! transposed)
: Why does transposition need to understand the mode?
I had in mind a problem with the way BarFly used to transpose. If the
tune is *strictly* in a mode it worked okay, but if you transposed a
The attitude that I take in Muse is that Muse does beaming automatically,
so I disregard the beaming information in the ABC. I can argue both
sides of this, but the argument for this action is that fundamentally
ABC is about describing the music, not the printed page.
Beaming is in the
Windows users have this little gem called NoteWorthy Player
(http://www.noteworthysoftware.com/player/), a brilliant MIDI
player that also shows the music notation.
I thought it used its own proprietary file format?
Does it incorporate its own MIDI - NWC converter? It must have if
it can
Sometimes I feel the need to find a tune by composer, but it
doesn't seems to be possible from JC tune finder. For example,
all the tunes by Marin Marais (there is some on the web).
Wouldn't anybody transcribing stuff that complicated put it into a
separate file or identifiably distinct site
One of the cuter illustrations of this: There's an old test
for telling whether someone is a scientist/engineer or one
of those humanities types. You ask them If you call a tail
a leg, how many legs does a dog have?
The answer, of course, is Four, because calling a tail a
leg doesn't
to the user,
and is exactly analagous to the original suggestion.
In fact quite a lot of Highland pipers work in exactly that way -
they don't have any idea what a sharp or flat is.
-
Jack Campin * 11 Third Street, Newtongrange
Bruce Olson wrote:
I had assumed that use of key-mode specification in ABC came in
only through a bit of misguided fuzzy logic. Figuring out how to
describe something completely in the minimum number of independent
parameters isn't always straightforward.
As others have pointed out, the
of
phrygian mode before. Explain?
-
Jack Campin * 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU, Scotland
tel 0131 660 4760 * fax 0870 055 4975 * http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/
food intolerance data recipes
.
-
Jack Campin * 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU, Scotland
tel 0131 660 4760 * fax 0870 055 4975 * http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/
food intolerance data recipes, freeware Mac logic fonts, and Scottish music
To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http
I gave a copy of my CD-ROM to the National Library of Scotland.
They said, great, can we have six of them please? This because
they're part of the legal-deposit system in the UK, including
others like the Mitchell, the Bodleian and the British Library.
They also gave me the darnedest form,
See Delven Side, p.15 of the Complete Repository volume 1. It's in
E dorian, described as In Enatural with flat 3d.
What is the keynote?
E natural with flatted 3rd is in the description, not the
specification, since the notation doesn't change if we drop that.
However, since the keynote
IT SUPPORTS NOTATIONS like [Af2],
... I don't know why it's
not in the standard, with for example a rule saying that in such a
notation the longest note prevails in the counting of the times,
for example
I've gone for highest note prevails in the counting of the times so
you can do
I can't see the point of taking up valuable space on the screen
for something you aren't using all the time.
But for browsing several tunes it could be usefull. Maybe if this
subwindow would stay on top and doesn't disappear if we load a
tune (so we could move it at a corner of the screen),
Well, I can think of a simple example of how one might use this:
[A4G2E2]2[F2D2]
This would have a 4-count melody note above the [G2E2][F2D2] chord
change. With L:1/8, the first chord could be drawn on a single stem,
with an open oval for the A4 note and filled ovals for the G2 and E2
There is a lot of abc that would give strange results from the
shortest-note rule. Recently someone pointed out that some of my
files have notation like [A3G] with no length for the second note.
There's a reason for this.
It doesn't matter what the reason is, there can't be so
Or did I get the semantics wrong? I'd expect [d6z2]2 to mean the same
as [d12z4] (whatever *that* meant)
Sorry, you are wrong. If the ]2 is just multiplied to the length
of the notes inside the chord, there would be no benefit of the [..]2
notation.
There is a considerable benefit:
I occasionally trawl Google to see where my email address might have
got to and find out who is responsible for the 200 spams a day I am
now getting. This is a new one that affects everybody here:
http://www.mail-archive.com/abcusers@argyll.wisemagic.com/msg04233.html
I don't know who those
They're probably subscribed to the abcusers list. Since you are a
list subscriber, you can send majordomo a who command, and go through the
entire list of abcuser subscribers, find any email addresses that look
suspect. Then you can send them an email demanding to know if they are
the
Anybody ported abcm2ps or any other useful Unix ABC utilities to IRIX?
I've recently acquired an old SGI machine; problem is that a useful
compiler for those costs money, and gcc for MIPS/SGI/IRIX isn't all
that good.
=== http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/ ===
Optional bars in the middle of a part, with the possibility of
putting text over them such as Play in line 2 only?
I'm not sure what's being requested here. But I've seen optional bars
in bagpipe and some other music, written with the usual sort of
endings but with just the one bar
if you had to expand them to 12-tone ABC for now, you'd have an
encoding of what you really meant).
X:1
T:A Yowe Came Ta Wir Door Yarmin
S:J. Irvine
B:Da Mirrie Dancers, 3rd ed, Shetland Folk Society, 1989
Z:(staff notation) Tom Anderson 1970
Z:(ABC) Jack Campin 2002
M:C
L:1/8
N:the F sharp is only
Two things I'm looking for:
(1) Pat Shuldham-Shaw's Leaving Devon, a waltz tune intended to
go along with Margaret's Waltz.
(2)Over The Rainbow. This is for the kids I teach. I know the
main bit but I'm darned if I can remember the recitative section.
===
Thanks to Aaron and Frank for their input; I used both. Aaron's tune,
while only a few keystrokes away from being perfectly acceptable ABC,
wasn't quite the way I remembered the tune as being structured, but
having it that way made it far quicker to get it the way I wanted from
those MIDIs.
I
microtonal modality? If so, does its approach put any
constraints on what ABC's syntax and semantics for this ought to be?
-
Jack Campin * 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU, Scotland
tel 0131 660 4760
notation.
I think somebody mentioned a way around this some time ago. Does anybody
remember how it was done?
You've got BarFly, which can create MIDI itself, so why do you need
to bother with abc2midi?
-
Jack Campin
I was wondering if anyone knows of collections of
ABC's online that contain a large number of bluegrass,
old-time, texas swing and country fiddling?
I don't think there are any.
I would have liked to do ABCs of the Henry Reed stuff at the
Library of Congress but their user interface is
Muse2 is now in the final stages [...]
So I am deciding what should be free and what should need paying for.
The following are in the plan:
Reading ABC and Printing it are free.
30 days free trial with all functions enabled
Saving files, playing files - you pay for.
From the
in 1977?
-
Jack Campin * 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU, Scotland
tel 0131 660 4760 * fax 0870 055 4975 * http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/
food intolerance data recipes, freeware Mac logic fonts
In some other fora, there has been much discussion lately
of the Great Firewall of China, which is blocking Chinese
access to all sorts of things on the Net. Among them are
most of the search sites, especially google.com, and all of
mit.edu. The folks at MIT are somewhat bemused by
Here's a Chinese piece* for the Erhu ...
which uses some ABC constructs I've not seen before.
BarFly guesses that P means an inverted mordent, but offers no
suggestions about what J is. Clue us in?
When using constructs that go beyond abc 1.6 it's a good idea
to describe them in the header.
From a friend who got it from a MIDI file from god knows where...
sounds Irish to me, a bit like the Star of the County Down.
The MIDI had been keyed in by somebody with a manically active
left hand; the accompaniment almost overwhelmed the tune.
X:1
T:Selkie's Waltz
M:3/4
L:1/8
Q:1/4=140
K:D
Is there a FAQ that discusses copyright issues?
No, and the topic tends to be sharkbait.
I just discovered the Grove encyclopaedia has quite a good discussion
of this.
I would like to share/trade the tunes I collect, but most come from
old books (not necessarily public domain).
The rule of
One of the problems still to be solved is the instability of email
addresses. If someone has your tune and 10 years from now wants to
contact you about it, will the email address work? Probably not, if
it's through a commercial ISP.
Karl Dallas and I share an inestimable advantage for the
Several years ago my wife, myself, and two others were Christmas
Caroling at a local store. We performed our four-part arrangements
from books cobbled together with photocopies. Yeah, that's a definate
No-No.
Anyway, a (over?) zealous individual from the audience (er, a customer
of the
While going through Jack's Embro... CD, I noticed that iabc will accept this:
(abc)d
but chokes on this:
(abc)d
[...]
Does anything written specify which way this is supposed to work?
I would prefer them to be equally acceptable, since I see the and
operators as binary. The only reason I
This week's edition of John Peel's Home Truths programme included
a listener suggestion for I'm My Own Grandpaw from one Phil Taylor.
Could he by any chance be a subscriber to this list, and have an ABC
version of the song?
(US readers probably can't get the programme: it's a human-interest
show
The new version of BarFly (version 1.3) is now available.
No problems with it yet on a quick run-through.
* Imports MusicXML files (export still to come).
Are there any interesting repositories of these yet?
One problem that may be either with your web server or my browser:
iCab gives the
One problem that may be either with your web server or my browser:
iCab gives the downloaded archive a TEXT file type and iCab creator
type. I can't see how to set any preference in iCab to fix this;
is it supposed to be under browser control? I can change it after
downloading, using a file
| MusicXML has an interesting construct to deal with this kind of situation.
| The backup and forward tags have the effect of moving the time point,
| so you can use backup to go back to the start of a measure in order to
| add an extra layer of notes. This means that you can deal with temporary
used that tune somewhere, didn't he? A piano piece?
-
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
?
-
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.
To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http
Is there any way to use abc in a webpage so it can be played, either on
loading, or when a link is clicked?
There are really just three approaches to doing what Karl wants:
1. Have several files on your server, for the ABC and its translation
to the other formats (PS, GIF, MIDI, whatever).
.
(There are probably better ways to notate that: I'm reconstructing
what I've heard various early music groups do with it).
-
Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760
http
It looks very good! Is it a result from Abcm2ps? oh yes, probably.
I think it looks better here (in png) than with ps / pdf on my
computer. Btw, maybe it could also generate a pdf file (if possible)
for those who want to print it (not ps, it's useless) ppl who can
install ghostscript probably
:|
-
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.
To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser
!)
-
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.
To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http
A friend of mine is a whistle/flageolet player and has whistles in all
the popular keys -- but knows only the fingerings for the D-whistl to
sight-read by. Rumor has it that most whistle tunes are written in D or
G keys, even if they are intended to be played in other keys by suitable
Are there any
tools out there that would allow us to take a collection of tunes in
ABC and transpose them to a key suitable for tinwhistle notation?
I use abc2abc to transpose. May be worth a go.
Agreed. But it's probably worth it to try to encapsulate that in a
wrapper script of sorts to
I don't think we have a solution to this one...
I've been transcribing a piece of piano music which has a passage
in sextuplets where the first note is taken on one hand and the
rest on the other (indicated by differing stem directions), both
parts are in the same staff). I can code that in ABC
Has anyone thought of compiling a centralized database of abc tunes
similar to olga.net.. I find that resource incredibly useful.
Basically something like John's tune finder, except that it saves
everything to a local database.
I would be willing to donate computing power storage space to
.
-
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
| 2. Make sure you aren't replicating something that's already been
|replicated, perhaps with mistakes or computer garblement en route.
|We don't need 105 identical versions of The Irish Washerwoman
|hiding one original take on the tune. (An easy way for file
|providers to do this
and will confuse the hell out of almost all ABC software
available.
-
Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760
http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack * food intolerance data recipes
What would be the officially correct header (if any) to indicate
which record a transcribtion is made from (Z, S, D?)
If by record you mean a rotating bit of plastic, D. *But* you
might want to be verbally explicit about what you mean, as some
people use D to reference recordings of a tune,
of the others does nothing).
-
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
I'm going to hospital to have my nose operated on, so I'll be away for
at least a couple of weeks.
When I was going into hospital for something similar, I took my laptop
in, intending to do some ABC transcriptions. Look up two threads with
the keywords laptop and hospital in ed.general, the
Does Phil's hack break anything? I can't think of any drawbacks
right now, except that you might want to write this:
ABC abc|ABC abc||\
_D.S.
DEF def|DEF def|...
to put the dal segno at the end of the line. Under Phil's new
interpretation that would force the two lines into one.
copyright notices that look just the
same as American ones, despite their laws being different.
-
Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760
http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack * food
| With abc2ps, you can use \ followed by a 3-digit octal value to get
| chars that might not be on your keyboard. The most common use I've
| seen of this has been \251, which is the code for the copyright
| symbol ('c' in a circle) in most of the ISO 8859-1 char sets.
| Not octal
) a conversion interface like that used by concertina.net
(4) download/billing links to the mobile phone networks
(5) a media law consultant.
Can we pull that off?
-
Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22
for?
-
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.
To subscribe/unsubscribe, point
I am sending this to four lists I subscribe to.
I will be signing off these lists under my present address, hopefully
resubscribing under a new one when I get back from holiday; this
address has now become completely unusable due to spam (about 300 spams
a day, requiring a filter update before
I'm typesetting some highland bagpipe music, and sometimes it
would be nice to have the bar lines aligned from one line to
the next. Notes as well, if possible.
Most books on music notation advise against aligning bars on successive
lines of music, since it makes it harder for the player to
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