Neil,

I thought you probably wanted to write a simplified MIDI as output rather than ABC. Still, you might want to play around with the tools in the open-source abcMIDI package. Under the control of VB or Tcl/Tk (or Python or whatever) you could perform the initial conversion using midi2abc but instead of saving the ABC file, just pipe the ABC directly into the abc2midi utility which will generate the new and simpler MIDI file from the simplified ABC. This sort of capability is the whole basis for the UNIX/GNU-Linux tools strategy and is the reason the ABC+ utilities are built the way they are. You could control the command line options from your GUI shell and make the whole process seem to be one unified application. You could even introduce key transpositions by piping the ABC through the abc2abc tool before piping into abc2midi. The whole thing would be controled by your GUI shell and, from a user perspective, be entirely integrated.

Just a thought. I haven't tried this but I think it would work. Of course you may have other reasons for wanting to build your own solution to the problem from scratch.

      - Mark