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With nowadays mp3 files, the midi files were never appeal to me, even with the WaveTable synthesizer, because I know hardware based WaveTable synthesizer might really sounds good, but they are not as good as mp3s. Moreover, the midi support under Linux has always been limited, so I never bother to figure it out, until now.
Why midi now? Because I've just found out the ABC music notation language (http://www.walshaw.plus.com/abc/).
The ABC music notation language is a wonderful tool to typeset sheet music. ABC is one of the best designed, easy to use, well-thought out, and nicely implemented notation formats I've ever seen: IMHO, it surpasses other good notation languages like GNU Lilypond or MusiXTeX. (Philip's Music Writer is a serious contender though.) You can write music in a very simple ASCII format and convert it to MIDI, or typeset it to make professional-looking scores. | ||
-- http://abcplus.sourceforge.net/ |
I'm always a big fan of documenting complicated things using plain text. With ABC to notate music in plain text, even as complicated as Beethoven's Symphony No. 7, (http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/abcmusic/sym7mov2.html), music notations can be easily and portably stored or transported electronically. IMHO, midi is the notation for music instruments; while ABC is the notation for human, and computer too. For machine to analyze tunes (via artificial intelligence), plain text based notation is the first step.
A common editor such as vi or emacs is all that is needed to write an abc file. After the file has been written, it can be converted to a standard MIDI file using abc2mid or to a print-ready format using abc2mtex (MusicTeX), abc2ps (PostScript) or abc2pdf (Adobe PDF). | ||
-- http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8629 |
With ABC notation, one can not only produce professional-looking scores, or MIDI sound files, but also can translate MIDI files into plain text notations as well, with the help of Midi2abc (YAPS, http://abc.sourceforge.net/abcMIDI/).
References:
ABC music notation language
http://abcnotation.org.uk
http://www.walshaw.plus.com/abc/
Abc collections
http://www.walshaw.plus.com/abc/tunes.html
There are now a large number of abc-notated tunes available on the internet
(mostly folk & traditional).
The ABC Music project
http://abc.sourceforge.net/
The ABC standard http://abc.sourceforge.net/standard/ and resources http://abc.sourceforge.net/resources.html
documented on: 2008-05-28, xpt