I’ve been using abc2ps on the MacOS, which is nice and tidy and compiles perfectly.
But I’ve recently been writing software with graphical user interfaces, which is unnervingly easy in MacOS X; and I’ve been toying with the idea of writing an ABC program with all sorts of goodies that I’d like.
For example, fancy sorting and searching capabilities. I’ve written a bunch of scripts that process and clean ABC files, and let me do crazy searches (like, find all ABC tunes that can be played on a 20-button concertina).
Displaying sheet music would be painfully easy, because OSX has pdf format ingrained in its architecture. That part would write itself.
Question: what kind of stuff would you like to see in a graphical ABC program?
Maybe instead you could write a Spotlight plug-in that does this? Spotlight indexes everything on your hard drive, including everything inside the ABC files on your computer, so it works great for tracking down note sequences…I can type any sequence of notes into Spotlight and it will pull up every tune that has that sequence in it. It makes Spotlight very useful for tracking down tunes that you remember by ear but can’t think of the names of, or for tunes that you can only remember one passage from and can’t think of how the rest of it goes. But if you could create a plugin that would execute your more specialized searches, that might be nifty.
Another potentially cool thing would be a set-list generator. I think there’s been some discussion here about what characteristics might make one tune good to follow another (key changes, starting notes, etc.). Wouldn’t it be nice to have a set-list maker that allows you to plug in the number of tunes you want in your set, what tune you want to start off with, and then let the program search your ABCs to find a set of tunes that would go well after the first one?
I prefer doing this in my own head or through trial and error, but sometimes I have to come up with sets in a hurry, and I know some people who truly hate trying to come up with set lists and would love something like this.
I actually threw together a Perl script to do this sort of thing a couple of years back, albeit working from a rather small database of tunes / songs and keys rather than a set of ABCs. Since the trick here was working around the small set of tunes, doing it with a large collection of ABCs would be pretty easy, I imagine…
GEES, all I was gojng to say was Barfly works great; but those suggestions are very good. I wonder if there is an there an open source version of barfly??
I’m a Barfly fan, myself. You can always email Phil Taylor with suggestions. He’s implemented a couple that I made. Note that, the last I heard, he was working in Carbon, though, not Cocoa.
What I’d like to have is a dedicated tablature generator with an easy interface. Tab seems to be just a second thought in most of the music software I’ve looked at–though it’s been many years since I’ve checked out any of the expensive stuff.
I tried something out last year–don’t recall the name–and editing the music after entering it was murder. For example, once you’d entered a note as a quarter note, you couldn’t just select it and change it to an eighth note. I never did figure out how to write a triplet.
I’d be happy to enter ABC by hand, but a clickable keyboard and/or fretboard might sometimes be easier. For me, doing all the notes by pitch first, then going back and figuring out the timing would often be easier.
Once you’ve got ABC, the app should generate MIDI to let you check the sound, then dots and a variety of tab. For stringed instruments, you should be able to specify tuning, capo position, etc.–and be able to move a note to another string. For whistle, you should be able to specify the whistle key.
If someone wants to do something like that in Cocoa, I’d be happy to provide whatever little help I could. (Of course, if it looked easy to me, I’d be doing it myself. And what I really want is to be able to play into a microphone and get a transcribed version.)
There are several packages that do this. Software that scans text from the printed page is called optical recognition software, and for dots it is called musical optical recognition. You scan the dots into an graphical image, and then the software examines this to create a midi file, which can then be translated into ABC.
None of these packages so far can cope with special characters like mordents, appoggiatura, acciaccatura, etc. None of these programs are written for ITM, so they don’t recognize special characters for ITM like the roll symbol, nor do they have the capacity for users to add their own symbols. From emails I have traded with these companies, their pride and joy is in having been able to recognize just the dots in so many different typesets. This may or may not be sufficient for your needs.
I used to have a Finale “Lite” piece of software; it was a free download. Really terrific. I don’t guess they do it anymore.
I think the Finale Pro version does work pretty well on ornamentation, but I believe the industry standard is something called Sibelius.
Barfly will play your abc back to you, but that’s a different story.
Does Audacity have any sort of a MIDI-to-dot conversion thing? (I have no MIDI capability, so no clue about plugins, etc.) It seems to do everything else!
I’ve used skink and still have it on my TiBook; but I prefer Barfly. I think Barfly has more features and I like the macro capabilites for ornamentation
OK, that was stupid. I’ll go away now. But good luck if you go for it! Brad & I can be your testers.
