BarFly is, as far as I know, the first "proper" (i.e. event-driven)
abc program
for the Macintosh. It is designed as an integrated environment for
working with
abc music files, consisting of a text editor, abc player and
transcriber in a
single application.
CAUTION \- this is a development version, and is as yet unfinished and
not
completely debugged. Please excercise caution, and if you use it for
anything
serious save your work frequently in case of crashes. If it should
hang up
on you, you can force it to quit (as in any Mac program) by holding
down the
command and option keys and hitting escape. Please accept my
apologies!
ABC
abc format is a new way of writing music using only ASCII text
symbols. It was
invented by Chris Walshaw as an easy way of transcribing folk music,
and is still
being developed. Eventually, it should be possible to represent any
music as abc.
As a computer file format it is extremely efficient (you can store
thousands of
tunes on a single floppy disk), but it is not just a computer file
format; with
a little practice it is perfectly easy to sight-read, and if you need
to write
down some music and don't have any manuscript paper to hand, it's a
very useful
pencil-and-paper language too. For a full description of the language,
pointers
to other software and to sites with tunes in abc format, go to:
