ABC Transcription Tools

[Michael Eskin]

Change of plans... made it way easier to play a single tune.
 

Just click anywhere in the tune and then click play.

Here's the description from the User Guide:

Play - Copies one or more ABC tunes to the clipboard and then opens them in Paul Rosen's amazing abcjs Quick Editor tool for playback.

To play a specific tune, click once (don't select) anywhere in the ABC for the tune and then click "Play".

 

The tool will automatically find the tune you've clicked on and send it to the abcjs Quick Editor for playback.

If there is a text selection in the ABC area, whatever is selected will be sent.

You can use this to send more than one tune to the abcjs Quick Editor

The abcjs Quick Editor only plays the first tune in it's own ABC editor.

If you select more than one tune in the ABC editor, and click "Play", you will need to edit the ABC in the abcjs Quick Editor editor to bring the tune you are interested in playing to the top.

The abcjs Quick Editor can also export MIDI and audio files of tunes.

Once you are happy with the playback, copy the ABC from the "abcjs Quick Editor tool, then paste the edited ABC back into this tool for further editing.

If you single-clicked and played one tune, the entire tune will be selected when you come back to the tool from the abcjs Quick Editor.

This makes it simple to paste any changes you might have made and copied from the abcjs Quick Editor.

[Roger Hare]

5 hours ago, eskin said:

Change of plans... made it way easier to play a single tune etc...

Change of plan here too! I was just about to pack it in, and go and get some well-deserved beauty sleep (😊) when I saw this and just had to try it.

 

Amazing - I'm sitting here listening to a 6-tune North-West Morris medley with no problems/hiccups whatsoever after loading it into the transcription tool and then xferring it to the 'ABC Quick Editor'. This is stupendous. Ta!

Edited March 1, 2023 by lachenal74693

[Michael Eskin]

A great new usability feature for those of you editing larger sets of tunes.
 

You no longer need to go scrolling through the notation to find the tune you're editing.

Now just click on it in the ABC.

The notation for the tune will instantly scroll to the top of the area below the ABC editor.  

 

If you scroll the notation so that the tune you are working on goes out of view, and click the tune again in the ABC, it will scroll back into view.  

The autoscrolling only happens when you click on a new tune or scroll the tune you are working on out of view and then click back on it.

This also works great with the new "Play" feature, just click anywhere on the tune, it will scroll into view, then click play to open the tune in the "abcjs Quick Editor" for playback.
 

The tune autoscroll on click feature only is available when running the tool on a desktop browser.

It was just a bit too messy and unusable on mobile devices with their pesky on-screen keyboards shifting the screen all over the place...

Have fun!

Demo video:

 

https://youtu.be/2MZltlkdVD0

 

Edited March 2, 2023 by eskin

[Michael Eskin]

Need more room to work on your tunes?

Just click the new "?" button:

https://youtu.be/wsMa1Y7ACWk

You can also resize the text area (on desktop browsers), resize your window and use the display size options (click "Show Controls") to maximize the notation visible under the ABC text box.

Of course, at any time you can click the zoom button at the top right to hide the editor and see your notation the full height of the window.

If you want to start with the top stuff hidden, just go to:

http://michaeleskin.com/abc?hide=1

The top bar show/hide status is also saved in Share URLs.

Edited March 2, 2023 by eskin

[Michael Eskin]

It's simple to change the playback instrument for the ABC Transcription Tools.

Thank you to Paul Rosen, the developer of the abcjs library, for this tip:

https://youtu.be/i6oKpGzS2lo

[David Barnert]

2 hours ago, eskin said:

It's simple to change the playback instrument for the ABC Transcription Tools.

Thank you to Paul Rosen, the developer of the abcjs library, for this tip:

https://youtu.be/i6oKpGzS2lo

 

Thanks, Michael.

 

Do you know if it’s possible to access Phil Taylor’s concertina sound font, linked in @Don Taylor’s (no relation) sig?

 

It used to be possible in (Phil Taylor’s) BarFly app (which can’t run on modern Macs), but it doesn’t seem like there’s a way to do it in EasyABC.

Edited March 2, 2023 by David Barnert
Added last sentence.

[Michael Eskin]

Finally did the work to make the tool responsive on wide-screen monitors, providing a dual-panel view when possible:

 

Demo video:

 

 

 

Edited March 3, 2023 by eskin

[Don Taylor]

15 hours ago, David Barnert said:

 

Thanks, Michael.

 

Do you know if it’s possible to access Phil Taylor’s concertina sound font, linked in @Don Taylor’s (no relation) sig?

 

It used to be possible in (Phil Taylor’s) BarFly app (which can’t run on modern Macs), but it doesn’t seem like there’s a way to do it in EasyABC.

David:

 

I suspect that this is a question for Paul Rosen and I also suspect that the answer will be that he uses whatever the default sound fonts are for the underlying OS on your computer. 

 

In the case of Windows they are truly awful and cannot be changed (at least not by me and I have tried several times).  But, I was told that it is possible to get Fluidsynth installed as the default midi player on a Mac, in which case you can install Phil Taylor's concertina sound font and use it in EasyABC and Paul Rosen's player.  I do not have a Mac so I cannot tell you if this is so, but maybe one of the Mac experts here can try it.

[David Barnert]

Thanks, Don. I just had a look at the Fluidsynth web site, and I’m baffled. Unless somebody walks me through it, I’m helpless. I did have a look at the List of applications using FluidSynth and no abc software appears on the list.

[Michael Eskin]

Here's Paul Rosen's page on sound playback in abcjs:

https://paulrosen.github.io/abcjs/audio/synthesized-sound.html

and specifically the sound fonts in abcjs:

https://paulrosen.github.io/midi-js-soundfonts/

 

and it does look like they are replaceable:
 

 

 

Edited March 3, 2023 by eskin

[Don Taylor]

4 hours ago, David Barnert said:

I did have a look at the List of applications using FluidSynth and no abc software appears on the list.

Musescore uses Fluidsynth internally and you can cut and paste ABC code into the abcimpex (https://musescore.org/en/project/abc-importexport) add-on so you could play ABC code using a concertina sound font that way ...

[David Barnert]

4 hours ago, Don Taylor said:

Musescore uses Fluidsynth internally and you can cut and paste ABC code into the abcimpex (https://musescore.org/en/project/abc-importexport) add-on so you could play ABC code using a concertina sound font that way ...

 

Yes, thanks. I’ve actually done that. I had never heard of Fluidsynth at the time (a year or two ago) but I discovered in MuseScore’s documentation that I could use the font.

[Michael Eskin]

Reduced the PDF size down by about half without sacrificing quality...

[Michael Eskin]

This morning added much better support for printing in portrait or landscape mode from your browser, every tune starts on it's own page:

 

Demo video:

https://youtu.be/6AlzAVNTRQA
 

Massive tunebook (386 tunes) PDF torture test:

While I wouldn't recommend trying to edit a 386 tune tunebook in the editor itself, you can certainly bring such a huge tunebook into the tool to print or export it to PDF using your browser's native Print feature.

 

Took about 30 seconds on Firefox on an M1 Mac to complete the PDF export.

Chrome or Firefox is recommended if you're going to try this. Safari on Mac didn't work as well.

Demo video:

https://youtu.be/3-6Xa2iDjOs

Edited March 5, 2023 by eskin

[Michael Eskin]

If the 386 tunes in the last video wasn't enough, I doubled it up to 772 for this test. While I wouldn't recommend trying to edit a 772 tune tunebook in the editor itself, you can certainly bring such a huge tunebook into the tool to print or export it to PDF using your browser's native Print feature.

It will take a while to initially render the tunes when you load them, probably well over a minute, but be patient. After that you can view them and then access the print menu on your browser.

Took about one minute for Firefox on an M1 Mac to export the complete PDF. 

 

Chrome or Firefox is recommended if you're going to try this. Safari on Mac didn't work as well.

 

Ultimate (772 tunes) PDF torture test:

 

https://youtu.be/i0RBbDASxqE

Edited March 5, 2023 by eskin

[Michael Eskin]

I figured out a way to minimize the re-rendering time by only re-rendering the one tune being edited on at any given time.

 

Of course, there are times when a full tunebook render is required, for example, when changing tablatures, or if a new tune is added or removed from the tunebook, or transposing the entire collection, changing global settings like line height, ABC filters, etc.

 

Now, other than the initial load and full render time for a large tunebook, the vast majority of the time, if you're just modifying the ABC for a tune, it should be very fast dealing with any size tunebook. Again, there may be times it will have to re-render the whole thing, but that's relatively rare.

 

If an operation is going to take a while, I now put up a spinner to let you know the tool is working.  The slow operation warning banner is now a thing of the past.

 

Edited March 5, 2023 by eskin

[Michael Eskin]

More about the optimizations for working with larger tune sets...
 

The ABC Transcription Tools now redraws only the tune you are currently editing, so it's much faster and more pleasant to work with large tune sets.

Previously it would redraw the entire set of tunes on each change which wasn't much fun when you had more than 50 or so tunes loaded at one time.

Not any more!

When you first load a set of tunes, it will draw them all at once, then after that, it will only redraw the one you are actively editing.

There are still some cases where a complete redraw of all the tunes is required, for example when switching from standard notation to one of the tablature options, but for normal day-to-day editing, the new experience is much improved.

 

 

I hope you will enjoy it!

Try the ABC Transcription Tools here:

http://michaeleskin.com/abc

User Guide:

http://michaeleskin.com/abctools/userguide.html
 

New demo video for my ABC Transcription Tool (updated 6 Mar 2023)
 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVOLh2Z-GDU

 

Demo video of the optimized rendering:

https://youtu.be/Jl2HRoCiPRU
 

 

Edited March 6, 2023 by eskin

[Michael Eskin]

ABC Transcription Tools is now (finally!) able to export PDF tunebooks with one tune-per-page or intelligently layout multiple tunes to fit on each page.

Demo Video:

https://youtu.be/jtiVzXB8xhQ

Try the ABC Transcription Tools here:

 

http://michaeleskin.com/abc

 

User Guide:

 

http://michaeleskin.com/abctools/userguide.html