robertmuth / easyabc

EasyABC

EasyABC

An open source ABC editor for Windows, OSX and Linux. It is published under the GNU Public License.

Features

• Good ABC standard coverage thanks to internal use of abcm2ps and abc2midi
• Syntax highlighting
• Zoom support
• Import MusicXML, MIDI and Noteworthy Composer files.
• Export to MIDI, SVG, PDF (single tune or whole tune book).
• Select notes by clicking on them and add music symbols by using drop-down menus in the toolbar.
• Play the active tune as midi (using SoundFont)
• See which notes are currently playing (Follow score)
• Contextual guidance (ABC Assist)
• Record songs from midi directly in the program (no OSX support at the moment).
• Just press Rec, play on your midi keyboard and then press Stop.
• The musical score is automatically updated as you type in ABC code.
• Support for unicode (utf-8) and other encodings.
• Transpose and halve/double note length functionality (using abc2abc)
• An abcm2ps format file can easily be specified in the settings.
• ABC fields in the file header are applied to every single tune in a tune book.
• Automatic alignment of bars on different lines
• Available in Italian, French, Danish, Swedish, Dutch and English
• Functions to generate incipits, sort tunes and renumber X: fields.
• Musical search function - search for note sequences irrespectively of key, etc.

Credits - software components used by EasyABC

• abcm2ps for converting ABC code to note images (developed/maintained by Jean-François Moine)
• abc2midi for converting ABC code to midi (by James Allwright, maintained by Seymour Shlien)
• xml2abc for converting from MusicXML to ABC (by Willem Vree)
• abc2xml for converting from ABC to ABC (by Willem Vree)
• nwc2xml for converting from Noteworthy Composer format to ABC via XML (by James Lee)
• wxPython cross-platform user-interface framework
• scintilla for the text editor used for ABC code
• python midi package for the initial parsing of midi files to be imported
• pygame (which wraps portmidi) for real-time midi input
• FluidSynth for playing using SoundFonts
• Many thanks to the translators: Valerio Pelliccioni (italian), Bendix Rødgaard (danish), Frédéric Aupépin (french). Universal binaries of abcm2ps and abc2midi for OSX are available thanks to Chuck Boody.

Links

• abcnotation.com
• abcplus.sourceforge.net

Keyboard shortcuts

• F5 Refresh
• F6 Play current song
• F7 Stop song
• Ctrl-Shift-F Find in Files (or show entire collection)