Jon, it may be that the MIDIs formerly at jonbanjo are now somewhere on Mudcat, but all the original links to them in old posts are now broken, and I didn't notice new ones posted. Then there's the problem of finding them (since the Mudcat MIDIs list appears quite incomplete), and something has happened to the Mudcat respository (-ies?), causing a great many of the DigiTrad links to now be invalid. (Fortunately, the mirror MIDI links still work.)

Do you still have those MIDIs cached away on a backup? If so, could you send them to me? With Joe's permission, I can rehost them on Joeweb and attempt to provide new links in the (most) relevant threads.


Pavane: Grishka was not implying that writing programs to interpret ABC was simple, rather that installing built programs for the purpose should be simple (with packages like ABCExplorer and EasyABC, for instance—or yours, for the Windows-dependent). And in truth it is, nor is using them really that complex. However, people are much more inclined to use a simple web utility they don't have to install than to try to install and learn to use a program of unknown complexity, particularly if they only want to use it infrequently. And they certainly don't want to have to pay for something they use only infrequently and spend more time updating than using!

That is why I (and I assume many others) greatly appreciated Jon's making the converter available. Even though I bought Finale and Barfly, I hardly ever use them because, for most things, extended ABC and Jon's converter produced cleaner scores and handled many real-world musical notation situations much better. I've now installed EasyABC—a good, free, downloadable Mac/Windows alternative to Jon's converter.

There's another problem with not having a good web-based converter: each converter suite only supports certain extensions, and most depart from the standards in how they implement extensions. So the only way to guarantee that the ABC you post is ABC that someone else can regenerate as you intended is if everyone can use the same converter. The abc2midi and abcm2ps programs used by Jon and several other other front-end providers are the most commonly encountered of the fuller-featured converters. They also stick closer to the proposed 2.0 standard than most other converters. Thus, they can be considered the de facto "lingua franca" for those wanting the widest portability for their notation, without being limited to the rather limited earlier ABC standards.