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abc Notation, where have you been all my life?!?
#1
I learned about ChordPro and abcNotation from THIS forum. Thanks to many of you for sharing your expertise. 

My use case: I sing while accompanying myself on my keyboard. I've been on a mission to learn a ton of new songs since I started singing in assisted living homes this past year.

I use three types of formats, (well now 4!) in mobilesheets.

I have pdfs with a vocal line and piano score. 

To be able to see it from my keyboard stand while standing, I use the annotation layer to paste over the lyrics with larger-font lyrics and I do the same for the chords, as I prefer to play mostly using the chords.

I use ChordPro for a lot of songs, but that only works for the songs I know really well. The advantage:  text size and key can be adjusted on the fly.

My favorite style is the lead sheet. But once again, I'm having to type over the lyrics with a larger font on many of them.

Many of the songs aren't in the ideal key for my voice, so it's great that I can transpose my keyboard! But then sometimes I forget to change it between songs. Oops, too high or too low!

And now entering abc! I wish I knew about this years ago. What a nifty code. It didn't take too long to figure it out with resources available online. 

I've done a number of projects on finale over the years, and it's so time-consuming. Simple to enter notes, but everyting else took so long to relearn everything after not using the program in between times. The big music programs can definitely do way more complicated music, but for a quick lead sheet, nothing beats abc notation. It's so simple.

Now, in the same amount of time it takes to edit a pdf with readable chords and lyrics, I can whip up a lead sheet by looking at the music (or starting with a midi), and then transpose it into any key I want. Brilliant!

There's great online resource:  https://michaeleskin.com/abctools/abctools.htm

I copy the code I entered on my ipad, then paste it into the tool, transpose with the button in the tool, and then copy and paste it back into my ipad in the new key. 

The tool can also spit out abc notation from a midi file! Not perfect, but it works. I have found the best procedure for my purpose is to use a midi program to strip the midi of everything but the melody line, then transpose the line into C first. (Otherwise, the abc ends up with accidentals through the whole song that I have to edit one by one. ) Then I  load just that into the online tool. It does a great job with a single line. After that, I select the key I want and transpose the abc.

But wait there's more...

So back to mobilesheets. When I first tried abc, I did some snippets within a ChordPro file to help me remember a part of the melody or a rhythm. 

Then when I saw that we could use whole abc files, I did a few like that. I had to do it in the text editor on my ipad, or in Easy ABC on my pc and import it to mobilesheets as a file with .abc extension. I was wishing I could just create one, like we can with ChordPro, instead of having to import a file created outside of mobilesheets. So now I just create a ChordPro file! 

I create a new song as a ChordPro with a .cho (without importing) and I can enter the song right within mobilesheets.

I do it just like a snippet, except it's the whole song in abc, for an instant lead sheet that lloks like a pdf, only better, bcause I can adjust it any way I want. It has to have a couple of chordpro directives first. Here's an example: 

{t: } 
{key: Bb}
{start_of_abc}
%%scale 1
%%staffscale 1.5
%%stretchlast
%%titlefont Helvetica-Bold 30
%%composerfont Helvetica 20
%%composerspace 1cm
%%tempofont Helvetica 18
%%annotationfont Helvetica-Italic 12
%%gchordfont sans-serif-bold 15
%%vocalfont condensed 20
%%maxstaffsep 150
%%staffsep 120
%%measurenb 0
%%barsperstaff <int>
X: 1
T: When You're Smiling
C:
M: C|
L: 1/4
Q:
K: Bb
*All your abc here ... *

{end_of_abc}
<span color=white>End</span>

The %% directives are not required, but it's what makes the music show formatted right for my device. I found that thess %%directives give a nice readable size on my ipad. I paste that block  in each time, then adjust individually for each song, especially the %%maxstaffsep and %%staffsep (and I have read that both need to be there, one doesn't work without the other).

I like to have the title centered, so I put it in the abc section (the T: field) The ChordPro {t:} needs to be there, but can stay blank. 

The MOST important is the ChordPro key! {k: Bb} or whatever. Of course, K:Bb has to be in the abc section, but IF the ChordPro key is set, too... Your whole abc song is now transposable with the transpose button! It will not transpose behind the scenes to change all your notes in the editor, like the chordpro will, so I use the online tool for that. But it DOES transpose everything with the "on-the-fly" button, if you've set the key with {k:}

The last thing I'll mention is the line at the end. It's not necessary for a one-page leadsheet, but on longer songs I couldn't get the additional pages to show up without putting something else of a chordpro infi after the {end_of_abc} code.  Any character or information will work, but I didn't want itvto show, so I wrote End, but turned it white with pango markup, so it's hidden.

That's it, folks.
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#2
I love that you and other ABC enthusiast like laurent have come to mobilesheets (the app and the forum).

I've been a fan of ABC since I discovered it a few years ago and was the one asking Mike to implement it in MS (though I reckon that it finally happened had more to do with all the fine work Johan/Sciurius did with chordpro and including ABC support there). Also I love that Mike used abc2svg to include it which AFAIK know is a first and the only one so far (all the other apps use the old abc2psm which isn't developed by Jef anymore (only bugfixed) so all the nice features Jef added in the last few years (including some requests of mine; have you tried the grid stuff yet?) are usable in MS.

I feel I haven't plugged MSP enough in the ABC community, but I still consider it in sort of beta phase, though (and laurent does a good job).

I still have on my list to make a post with some examples how to use ABC so more can realize what a powerful and versatile feature it is. While too few musicians use ABC (at least in the main genres of Rock/Pop, Jazz and classic music) so you can't just download many scores and songs and have to write or at least convert the songs, I still don't think many have realized what a game changer it is within MSP, to be able to get there notation scores (with MXML and Vim DeVrees conversion tools) into MSP to get an transposable and in many ways editable score in a music viewer on iOS/Android/Windows.

Mike, I still think it would be another strong sales point and (for now) unique feature, if you implement opening/converting mxml files to ABC within the app.

Enough of that now. Mike, keep up the good work (and don't forget ABC over all the library separation requests) :-)
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#3
@BRX, incidentally, what would you recommend for converting mxml to ABC? I'm more comfortable with ChordPro format, but just starting to dip my toes into ABC.
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#4
Well, the mentioned ABC Tools by Michael Erskine are the simplest für single quick conversions.

https://michaeleskin.com/abctools/abctools.html

Mandolintab.net does too

https://www.mandolintab.net/abcconverter.php

I'm not sure what scripts they are using, but it guess it's all the scripts by Wim DeVree

https://wim.vree.org/svgParse/index.html

which I have used (and which are continually updated and improved. He provides command line tools as well for batch conversion.

Have a look also at

https://blechtrottel.net/abc2xmlgui.html

and

https://blechtrottel.net/abc2xmlgui.html

The former is a plugin for MuseScore (so they are using Wim's scripts as well), the later a GUI for the command line tools.

Of course conversion from notation program to mxml and to ABC can't be perfect because of the different approaches (graphical notation against text based one) but you can get some pretty good results.
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