Re: evaluating the transposing software discussion

Mitch Gordon wrote:
> Some posters have suggested that you create your music in ABC in the
> first place. Opinions will differ, but for myself as a musician, I
> think in notes on the page, not in text character codes. I would find
> writing out music using ABC to be very clumsy and nonintuitive.

ABC *is* a bit awkward, especially if you want to use it to express more 
than a simple melody line. And it's deliberately somewhat limited. But 
it's still farm more easily readable and editable by humans than most of 
the alternatives. If you want to communicate with folks who are 
unwilling to spend *any* money or effort  on music programs, ABC is a 
very useful tool. Among other things, since it's just text you can put 
ABC into the middle of a mail message -- or a newsgroup posting -- 
without upsetting anyone.

If you'd rather work with a graphical musical score, there are simple 
tools for editing/displaying ABC in that form... or you can convert the 
ABC to MIDI and use any MIDI-aware music program (which means just about 
everything that isn't ABC-only).

> I think you misunderstood when you thought you heard that "transposing
> software has a long way to go". I think that had to do with software
> that can read in sheet music from a scanner.

That's my guess too. Transposing is *TRIVIAL*... once you've got the 
score in a form that the computer understands (ABC, MIDI, or one of the 
proprietary formats). Getting it into that form either means some manual 
work in transcribing it, or a scanner-based tool followed by manually 
correcting anything the program didn't quite read correctly.

--
Joe Kesselman, http://www.lovesong.com/people/keshlam/
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