IMSLP Forums

If you haven't heard of it already, ABC notation is a very simple, human-readable way of notating (simple) music using text (the ASCII characters available on a typical computer keyboard).

For details, see http://staffweb.cms.gre.ac.uk/~c.walsha ... ollections

It is also worth noting that there is free software available to print, display and edit music in ABC.

While I don't think it would be particularly helpful to the IMSLP it does provide a very convenient way of storing, and sharing tunes, and since there are some pieces that seem to be perpetually in demand, I have started a database to include some of them.

So far, I am up to:
Happy Birthday
Wedding March (Lohengrin)
Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring
Air on the G string
Rule Britannia
The Star Spangled Banner

Lilypond is also worth looking into if you're going to do notation in ascii. (www.lilypond.org) You can use it to generate your abc files or use their own language. The quality of the output is quite nice for the little amount of tweaking that has to be done.

When I was looking for software to help with musical notation I looked at Lilypond, and while the finished result looks quite good, I was put off by the complexity of the commands.

One of my first jobs was as a computer typesetter - we were asked to set the most complex matter on a non-justifying keyboard, and often didn't see our mistakes until months later when the proofs were returned after correction. Things like math equations and tables were particularly difficult.

I'm afraid Windows has spoiled me; in this day and age there is no excuse for not having a graphic user interface and I am a little surprised that it is not yet available for Lilypond.

I agree that the lilypond format is a bit frustrating because it isn't stable. I also hate that to tweak anything it requires knowledge of scheme, a lisp variant. The file format changes with every release. If the developers changed their approach and stablized the format and did away with scheme tweaking they would get a lot more users.

There is a gui, denemo (http://denemo.sourceforge.net/), but development is slow I believe because with each new release of lilypond they have to change also. (rosegarden can also be used as a frontend) In any case there is an abc2ly converter that can be used with lilypond's great backend.

While it is nice to have a gui to get people introduced to lilypond, in the end I would not use it. I hate MSWord because there is no "reveal codes" that wordperfect has and I can't directly tweak the internal format. (Same with most programs today) Programs like LaTeX and lilypond still have their place in this world with people like me. Plain text is much easier to work with.

If you are more comfortable working with plain text, have you ever tried data processing with AWK? (i.e. GAWK)

It has a lot of similarity with C, but is a very simple, easy to learn scripting language for data processing. These days I hardly use it, but way back when I was working with UNIX I used it for a lot of things, including an interactive calculator.

I picked it up again fairly recently because I hoped to be able to convert my Finale Notepad files to abc but the Notepad format has proved to be more of a challenge than I have patience for.