Apart from its versatility and its ease of use, the other main advantage of ABC is the sheer volume of tunes available on the internet in this format. All free to download and very quick to download as well as each one is a very short .txt file.

In the early days of the Village Music Project John Adams was giving away lots of 3 1/2" floppy disks (remember them?) to everyone who came to his workshops. Each contained the ABC software and literally thousands of tunes that John and his helpers had transcribed from a mass of manuscript sources - and you know that you could not all that much information on one of those floppies. (If you play tunes and then you haven't been there, I would suggest that a visit to http://www.village-music-project.org.uk/ is essential.)

The ABC software is a very basic and not really very user friendly but perfectly usable once you get used to it. I suppose that we all have our own favourite music stave software. Personally, I like using Noteworthy Composer and here is a good tip for NWC composers; the estimable Bryan Creer ("The Snail" to Mudcat users) has written a neat piece of software which converts ABC files to Noteworthy Composer files - it is called ABC2NWC.
Email Bryan Creer for details.