Mark Hall wrote:

> I am writing a thesis relating to 'abc', and I would like to know why
> you use 'abc' as apposed to alternative notation software?

* I really like the flexibility in abc (placement of accidentals, any
number of beats in a 4/4 bar, stuff like that), it's the closest I've
seen to a piece of music paper.

* It produces nice quality prints (abcm2ps)

* It's fast and has small file size

* You can do so many things with text format, for instance I did
http://www.lovsangsmappen.dk that does on-the-fly transposition, format
conversion of a selection of files. I'm also warming up to write a
beagle plugin that'll allow search of contour ("if you can whistle it
(or a fragment of it) you can find it")

* I can change the layout of all my scores in one place

* I accumulated over 1500 tunes in abc

* Since I'm running linux, all the commercial big ones are either not
available to me or would be inconvenient to run. But actually I'm not
sure (from what I heard from my winfriends) I would ever have the
patience to struggle with finale to make it do what I need

--
peace, love & harmony
Atte

http://www.atte.dk | quintet: http://www.anagrammer.dk
| compositions: http://www.atte.dk/compositions