Well, I don't know how and to which extent ABC should be worked into chordpro. After all chordpro is for "stringers" who mostly don't really want/need melodies in notation. And ABC in its most common use is for melody only (for all those jig/folk/traditional music players). But I leave that gladly to Sciurius and other cpro specialists.
And for those simple ABC tunes (like in the tunebook) it indeed is really easy to read the melody from the ASCII text.
What I really find interesting is the development of the ABC standard which now allows the rendering of really complex quality scores with relatively small ASCII files which are near the quality of the output of dedicated notation programs like MuseScore, Sibelius, Finale. (Though the extra information for such rendering which is still not too hard to understand makes it more difficult to read melodies directly from the ASCII ABC file).
I for one am looking very much forward for native ABC support in MSP. Mike, in case it hasn't occurred to you, you could even implement a "pseudo MusicXML" support into MSP without coding for rendering MusicXML directly, since you could use xml2abc for an import/conversion to abc and render that. xml2abc gives quite good results.
I have a request for a future ABC implementation. It would be great if there would be a direct editing functionality of the ABC file (you probably planned that) but even better if it would be with a split screen with a WYSIWYG rendering (like in EasyABC). Just dreaming.
And for those simple ABC tunes (like in the tunebook) it indeed is really easy to read the melody from the ASCII text.
What I really find interesting is the development of the ABC standard which now allows the rendering of really complex quality scores with relatively small ASCII files which are near the quality of the output of dedicated notation programs like MuseScore, Sibelius, Finale. (Though the extra information for such rendering which is still not too hard to understand makes it more difficult to read melodies directly from the ASCII ABC file).
I for one am looking very much forward for native ABC support in MSP. Mike, in case it hasn't occurred to you, you could even implement a "pseudo MusicXML" support into MSP without coding for rendering MusicXML directly, since you could use xml2abc for an import/conversion to abc and render that. xml2abc gives quite good results.
I have a request for a future ABC implementation. It would be great if there would be a direct editing functionality of the ABC file (you probably planned that) but even better if it would be with a split screen with a WYSIWYG rendering (like in EasyABC). Just dreaming.