ABC music notation player

[Mark Swift]

Hello,

Here is an ABC music notation player plus a few demo ABC files.

V1.0.1, 07 Nov 2024

PLAYABC.zip

(8.3 KiB) Downloaded 112 times

The player will beep a tune and export it as a stand-alone BASIC program.
Here are some example exports from the player:

XMASBEEPS.zip

(5.08 KiB) Downloaded 116 times

ABC is a text-based music notation format that uses characters, letters, digits and punctuation marks to transcribe music. It's meant to be understandable by both computers and people.
https://abcnotation.com/wiki/abc:standard:v2.1

When writing the player I discovered that the notation was a little bit more complex than I had hoped, so the program got messy very quickly.

You can find ABC notation tunes here, although the player will likely only play the most simple constructs:
https://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/cgi/abc/findtune

The player was mainly tested on QPC,
...hope you find it interesting.

[pjw]

Cute
Sadly theres not much to be done about the sound quality..

[pjw]

Impressive!

Wow.jpg (17.51 KiB) Viewed 2060 times

Funny, aint it: when someone comes up with something like this everyone is in a tizzy. Yet,

".."

Yawn.jpg (10.22 KiB) Viewed 2060 times

when someone produces something like this, no one has anything to say..

[dilwyn]

Cunningham's Law. You want feedback or some information, put a deliberate small mistake in. People won't be able to stop themselves correcting you.

Silence usually means you got it right.

[pjw]

<>
Silence usually means you got it right.

I dont buy that: Silence is the ultimate ambiguity. It can mean whatever you want it to mean - or whatever you fear.

It seems logical to me that one would want to encourage what one would like to see more of and to discourage what one would like to see less of. Silence to me means discouragement or absence of interest; you dont want to upset people more than you have to..

As for exhibit A, above, I certainly wouldnt want more of that, although some gentle encouragement as to how one could improve things might be in order.. Exhibit B might be worthy of a Thank you or a Well done, or at least some kind of acknowledgement..

Just my 2d's worth..

[Mark Swift]

It's not perfect as a player. It fails on many tunes but it's a first attempt and it kept my interest for a couple of days.
No doubt I'll keep coming back to it over time to try and squeeze more out of those retro sounding beeps.

I'm as guilty as anyone at being silent. Sometimes I feel that a 'like' button would be useful.
So I don't find silence that discouraging.

[NormanDunbar]

Cunningham's Law. You want feedback or some information, put a deliberate small mistake in. People won't be able to stop themselves correcting you.

https://xkcd.com/386/

Cheers,
Norm.

[dilwyn]

[Popopo]

It's not perfect as a player. It fails on many tunes but it's a first attempt and it kept my interest for a couple of days.
No doubt I'll keep coming back to it over time to try and squeeze more out of those retro sounding beeps.

I'm as guilty as anyone at being silent. Sometimes I feel that a 'like' button would be useful.
So I don't find silence that discouraging.

Agree with you,
A 'Like' button would be very helpful.
About this tool for sound, I like the idea very much.
It separate the sound we want to reproduce from the player, what could be very very helpful for demos, games and so on.
I thought already superBasic has something similar, in a similar way how we use to compose or write some famous tunes in ZX Spectrum 48K.

I was looking for something like that for the MDPs that I want to add some extra sound features. So this could be very helpful for me to make some tests.

In that way... yes, the QL has a beeper and not high expectations for a stock QL, but... what if it would change in the next future with a very cheap addon?

I will keep an eye on it.
Thank you for this option that I would like to try out ASAP.

Note: a little video demo about how it works (or use it) would be really great.

[qbits]

Hi Mark,
Took a quick perusal around the ABC web site. A lot to take in, I see how it can quickly get complicated and easily give you a headache. Any thought on an EasyABC front end editor with a bit more graphical screen display along the lines of QBITSounds?

My thoughts as I assume yours .abc used as a common file format for QL Sound does have advantage of ac-cess to a lot of tunes and future use with QSound and AY-3-8910 implementation.

QBITS