The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #125109   Message #2769418
Posted By: meneermalik
19-Nov-09 - 05:07 PM
Thread Name: convert ABC to Finale???help
Subject: RE: convert ABC to Finale???help
Hey Mick and everyone.

I've been giving myself headaches trying to get this going and researching.

Yeah Leeneia, these are files I edited myself and the large part of these come from old recordings or library manuscripts, all in all I have about 6000 in several large ABC files to convert. As Mick mentioned we have all the needed software, it's just a matter of trying to cut off some 50 hours or more of work to convert them.

The process is this
-split the large ABC tune files into individual files for each tune.
-convert those individual ABC files to XML
-convert those XML files into Finale (.mus)

So far I found an old program I used to use to split the files but I've yet to get it to work now. ABCMUS by Henrik Norbek. It splits a large file into individual files for each tune. At the moment I keep getting error messages when it starts the splitting process and tries to save the files. I emailed Henrik to get his help so we'll see. That's the only program I found so far for that.



Mick, I tried the script for Finale. Definitely helped! Thanks. I remember reading the manual and didnt read anything about having to have a document open. That helps lol. The script wouldnt save the converted file so I tweaked it a bit. Here's the script

menu item "Import"
type "XMLfilename" in "Filename:"
click "Open"
save as mus
type "newfilename for musfile"
click "save"
menu item "close"

where as you said Mick, the "xmlfilename" is the name of the file to be converted and "newfilename..." is the name you want for the new .mus file. That seems to work fine. I'm not sure if that's what you were aiming for? The only thing I'm wondering is if there could be a script to automate the file name thing. Otherwise I think it's more time consuming to have to do that for each file than it would be to simply manually import and click 'save as'. Dolet definitely seems to take care of that. Going to play around with it some more after dinner.

-Sonny