ABC2WIN works fine for most things, but I've had problems. I don't like the way it plays trills or the slurs for holding a note.

It's also awkward on some folk and very old tunes that change key or timing in the tune. I can't make the display come out right. The examples shown in the Samples file on the ABC homepage website do not all come out the way the samples are shown.

ABC2PLAY will convert ABCs to MIDIs, with lots of instrument options, but the MIDIs are often poor, with erratic timing and missing notes. ABC2MIDI gives no options, but much superior (rudimentary) MIDIs in my experience.

ABC2MIDI will run through a file of ABCs, converting them to MIDIs in short order, but it assigns them a sequential order number, and that's not precisely how my ABC files are arranged. In spite of the X:n designation in a long file of ABCs, ABC2WIN and ABCPLAY give a menu that is in alphabetical order by title, but ABC2MIDI gives a serial order with no titles, and it's a formidable job to re-identify the tunes with their titles, if your X:n designation is not in serial order, and mine aren't. I have found new and interestin variants of some tune that I've put in useing a valid X:n but grouped with other variants of the same tune and not added at the end of the file.

Does anyone know of a cheap software system that one can stack up many MIDIs in a single file, (and with titles)? I can easily convert all ~ 800 ABCs on my website to MIDIs, but putting them all on my website as individual files is impractical.

I tried to write my own ABC player in Quickbasic, but ran into the upper limit of the number of subroutines that Quickbasic could handle when I was about 1/2 way through with the play part, and never got to the display or printout sections.