As easy as ABC?

[ecohawk]

I believe I just learned more about keys and music notation than I have in the past 58 years.....

I love this forum.

ecohawk

[killthemessenger]

Maybe, in all of the above, someone else has already made the point, but one of the major advantages of staff notation is that it is graphic; you can see the shape of the line and the size of the intervals very clearly at a glance. This is good for melodies, but especially for chords, where the shape of the chord has to be taken in at a glance if you're sight reading. You can instantly see which inversion it is and what the root note is in conventional notation. (Having said this, I'm sure you can learn to sight read ABC notation if you work at it, just like anything else.) A further advantage of staff notation is that it is easy to transpose at sight, for the same reasons.

These days, anyway, the whole benefit of text-based notation is surely a bit outdated? Sending a jpg or whatever of some staff notation is no longer the big deal it used to be in the old days of slow connections.

[Peter Duggan]

but one of the major advantages of staff notation is that it is graphic; you can see the shape of the line and the size of the intervals very clearly at a glance.

While I agree 100% with that (taking us right back to the OP)...

These days, anyway, the whole benefit of text-based notation is surely a bit outdated? Sending a jpg or whatever of some staff notation is no longer the big deal it used to be in the old days of slow connections.

I'm not so sure about that! So, while I'd be much quicker learning something off said .jpg (but prefer a .png if we want it to look nice at tidy file sizes!), the potential value of the ABC's more as an interchange format to import to something else. (Think .txt file rather than .jpg to process in MS Word or OpenOffice and you've got much less work to do...)

[DrPhill]

These days, anyway, the whole benefit of text-based notation is surely a bit outdated? Sending a jpg or whatever of some staff notation is no longer the big deal it used to be in the old days of slow connections.

And computers can search or manipulate the ABC for various purposes - tune matching, chord generation, lyric searches, transposing/ Even representing it as Staff .

And we can paste ABC on the forum much more easily than posting an image.....

[jemtheflute]

And editing is so much easier in ABC - if you have a graphic image, you have to generate a complete new one. Editing is also massively easier than in those blasted drag & drop programs like Sibelius and Finale, which even when you get familiar with them are still bloody awkward. I use ABCEdit and find it excellent. I can clearly see the staff notation I am creating above the ABC I'm writing/editing.

I've tried Finale and Sibelius etc. in the past and it takes ages to get familiar with their interfaces and quirks (I never persisted) - far longer than familiarisation with ABC conventions. I think Sib is probably fine if you are inputting by playing a midi instrument, but compiling scores manually with keyboard/mouse etc. is a nightmare!

Have they actually got an ABC import-export function for Sibelius now? They didn't use to have and from what I heard were snottily resistant to writing/adding/facilitating one.....

[Peter Duggan]

Editing is also massively easier than in those blasted drag & drop programs like Sibelius and Finale, which even when you get familiar with them are still bloody awkward.

Have to disagree with you there, Jem!

I think Sib is probably fine if you are inputting by playing a midi instrument, but compiling scores manually with keyboard/mouse etc. is a nightmare!

My experience is quite the opposite, now always working (rapidly!) through computer keyboard and mouse because I'm getting what I want without all the post-input 'tidying' baggage that's prevalent with other methods.

Have they actually got an ABC import-export function for Sibelius now? They didn't use to have and from what I heard were snottily resistant to writing/adding/facilitating one.....

Don't think so, but I Googled this about the time I started this thread, think it's maybe possible via the intermediate step of MusicXML and might yet start experimenting with Sibelius plug-ins myself if you give me a year or two (or ten!) to get familiar with both ABC and plug-in specs!

[Peter Duggan]

Hmm .. computers seem like trees .. they serve themselves as do worms and letters.

But they're still letting you express your opinions here?

and the old guys eventually get round to showing you how to play a tune. .. if you hang around long enough .. persistance tends to work better than technology.

So you don't like dots? We know! And the young Mozart allegedly memorised the whole of Allegri's Miserere from a single hearing. But most of us need more help than that, and that's where notation comes in (next part of the story is that he sat and wrote it down)!

[david_h]

... So, while I'd be much quicker learning something off said .jpg (but prefer a .png if we want it to look nice at tidy file sizes!) ...

PDF files from the ABC are much tidier in size than those with included images and look nice at whatever scale you choose to view them.

[Peter Duggan]

Anyone know how the PDF rendering thingy at concertina.net's doing that?

Just ran The Boat that Sailed Backwards through it again and downloaded the PDF to take a look at, but can't see how the notation's done (doesn't look like fonts when just Helvetica & Times are listed, but 11.7 KB file size seems too small for much else).

But we're agreeing anyway when we're both answering killthemessenger's question about text-based notation being outdated with reasons (good interchange format!) why it's not. And my real point about .png over .jpg is not music-specific, but that .jpg gets routinely overused for graphics which would be better served by other graphic formats.

[david_h]

Anyone know how the PDF rendering thingy at concertina.net's doing that?

No, but the Postscript code generated by abcm2ps has, near the start, PostScript graphics definitions for clef signs, tadpoles and the other squiggly bits. Then it proceeds to refer to them much as it would a font. Very compact. The PDF will be that rendered into PDF-speak.

In Acrobat the PDF from concertina.net seems to have similar graphical objects, but not quite the same as it generates itself from the abcm2ps output.

[cboody]

Why not use pdf?

1) it is not nearly as space efficient as abc. About a ration of 20 to 1. (I just checked sizes of a couple of one page music pdf files on my machine and compared that to a file containing 4 abc tunes. Realize that the abc storage might actually be a good deal less since most text programs use some minimum amount of file storage.)

2) You have no control over the look of the final product with pdf.

3) Changing things with a pdf is at best much more complicated than with an abc file. Consider changing the key of the tune or adding or adjusting the chord names.

4) pdf files can't become part of a text based dialogue and abc files can.

5) Searching a collection of pdf files, particularly if single files contain multiple tunes can be difficult if not impossible. ("Find me all my jigs in Edorian" for example easy in properly constructed abc files and next to impossible with pdf files). I can create an index of my abc files (which probably number around 5000 and maybe much more yet take less than 500 megs of space) that lists title, key, tune type, meter, source, location on my drive and perhaps other things. That index will go directly into a database/spreadsheet program and allow me to sort and search by any of the fields. Try that with pdf (or Finale or Sibelius for that matter).

6) Want a quick check of what a tune sounds like (admittedly not a good one usually)? You can get it with an abc file and not with a pdf.

That's probably enough for now.

[MTGuru]

Anyone know how the PDF rendering thingy at concertina.net's doing that?

No, but the Postscript code generated by abcm2ps has, near the start, PostScript graphics definitions for clef signs, tadpoles and the other squiggly bits. Then it proceeds to refer to them much as it would a font. Very compact. The PDF will be that rendered into PDF-speak.

Yes. And I'm pretty sure Concertina.net uses Ghostscript for the PS->PDF conversion.

IIRC, the abcm2ps PostScript output, while compact, is actually larger than it needs to be, because the complete set of all possible ABC squiggles is defined, whether needed to render the particular piece or not. I wrote a Perl program to strip out the excess and reduce the PS file size, but found it too much of a bother for the savings incurred.

[david_h]

I was only suggesting that PDF was more compact and better quality than JPEG or PNG for the traditional score, not as a transfer medium. That ABC can easily be converted into PDF is a plus for ABC as a transfer medium.

Maybe I'm lazy MTGuru, I would call it 'get the job done pragmatism', but I can identify with the guy who just wanted to put the whole lot into the header rather than make another pass to find what was needed. He/she probably meant to come back and code that up later

[MTGuru]

Maybe I'm lazy MTGuru, I would call it 'get the job done pragmatism', but I can identify with the guy who just wanted to put the whole lot into the header rather than make another pass to find what was needed. He/she probably meant to come back and code that up later

Can't disagree with you, David. According to Larry Wall, the 3 great virtues of a programmer are laziness, impatience and hubris.