On JC’s ABC tunesite, when I convert the ABC version to sheet music via Concertina, the first line is usually one long measure with a bunch of notes, that aren’t necessarily in the correct time signature. What is that?
topping this
Can’t help with your Concertina question as I use ABC2Win and print out the sheet music from that program. It has its own anomalies but I’ve always been able to work around them.
I’ve found it to be a tremendously useful piece of shareware and did not hesitate to pay $20 to unlock the print feature.
M
I tried it with a tune and it did the same thing. I erased the long “F” line in the list of stuff at the top. T, L, M etc and then that line disappeared.
Steve
So it’s not really important for anything/ I guess that was my question, was it something I should know.
Thanks.
As someone who uses abc a lot to get tunes, your question IS important but the answers vary.
I have used abc from many sources and there are often conversion issues. In your case, I would guess that there was a garbled command that insisted on a line break rather than a default of a certain number of bars per line.
There are several ways to make a line break, depending on the software.
I have found the most headaches come from copy-pasting off of a WEB page or from email messages. For instance, when people post abc on this Forum, it is almost always buggy when I try and paste it into Barfly. Usually there is something missing, like a required field, or a space after the colon of a field for example. Those first few sets of figures, the required fields, must be correct to even render the tune.
Another problem occurs often when the displayed piece is converted to postscript then made into a pdf (which is the method I use to print and share tunes). I often don’t find out what was wrong until I reach that stage, having gone thru process of converting to .ps then distilled via Acrobat distiller.
abc is a wonderful resource but considering fonts, platforms and various similar software programs, these bugs are here to stay.
And once again (I have mentioned this before), I find that Henrik Norbecks are the LEAST buggy, no matter how I convert them. He is obviously a detail person and has transcribed things with care. A lot of people undoubtedly post things without really knowing the ins and outs of abc.
If the tune you want is available on Norbecks, I would always take it first. You have the best chance of a good printout and display from him.
Have you tried using the GIF or PDF option at Tunefinder, rather than the ABC? If you want the sheet music, that works well, since it’s already laid out for you.
Redwolf
No I haven’t. I need to try that. Thanks.
SteveK had it right – it’s the “F:” line in output from JC’s abc tune finder that causes the converter at Concertina.net to choke. That line only contains information about the source file from which JC plucked the tune … it’s not an essential part of the notation.
I second the Weekenders’ endorsement of Norbeck’s collection as consistently having good abc’s … you can search his collection directly, at
http://home.swipnet.se/hnorbeck/abc.htm
or you can find his transcriptions in JC’s output by hovering your mouse over the links and looking for the ones that contain “home.swipnet.se” in the URL.
As Redwolf points out, you can get standard-notation output from JC’s using the .gif and .pdf links. In my opinion, though, the quality of the output is not as good as that from Concertina.net. The music fonts from JC’s are too small for my tastes, and it often does weird things with first and second endings.
When I find a tune I want on JC’s, I follow this sequence:
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I use the text link to display the abc source code
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I copy and paste that into the window at Concertina.net
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I delete the F: line
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I check that all the important headers are there. (Norbeck and others often omit the “L:” header, which for standard reels and jigs is L=1/8. Most of the time you can get away without this, but if you put mutiple tunes in the same file, lack of the L: header can produce unexpected results. I like to include it for completeness.)
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I may edit the abc to change the number of measures per line or tweak it in other ways
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I click “convert”
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If I’m happy with the result, I click the button to convert it to .pdf, then print it. If not, I use the back button, then adjust the abc.
No doubt the above steps look like a lot of trouble, but once you get the sequence down, it goes quite quickly.
If I want to edit a tune extensively I do it in BarFly, a free abc package only available for Macs, because it allows you to edit in one window and see the notation change instantly in another window.
–C#/D
The music fonts are tiny, I will admit. It can be hard to tell which note is which at standard reading distance. I use it primarily to get confirmation on a tune I’m trying to learn by ear. I’ve had enough trouble with the various ABC conversion programs that they often seem more trouble than they’re worth.
I wonder why JC uses such a tiny music font?
Redwolf
In a related problem, lately when I try to open up any kind of file from JC’s, it comes up in Notepad. Notepad won’t let me copy the text or drag and drop it into Concertina, so if I want to get the sheet music I have to type it over myself.
When I get stuff from Henrik Norbeck’s site, the tunes come up as part of a web page, which I can copy with no problems. Maybe the problem is that JC’s come up as files that must be opened, rather than pages?
Any thoughts on how to work around this without re-typing everything?
If you pull up the tune in PNG format you can right click on the text, copy it and paste it into a Wrd document. Yo can then stretch it out and print it in Word. You can use landscape mode to allow for more stretch.