The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #150616 Message #3510816
Posted By: Artful Codger
01-May-13 - 05:45 PM
Thread Name: Tech: Midi, abc and words
Subject: RE: Tech: Midi, abc and words
When exporting from ABC utilities (largely irrelevant to the original request), one generally has control over the expressive timing (swungness) of dotted rhythms. If you're exporting to MIDI explicitly for score transfer, you can specify that no swing be applied to dotted rhythms, and when the MIDI is subsequently imported, there should be no misrendering of the dotted rhythms.
I still don't recommend MIDI as a transfer medium, unless you have absolutely no other choice.
To my knowledge, no product to date fully supports the 2.0 ABC standard, particularly in regard to multiple voices and formatting. But at least one can hand-edit the plain-text in order to resolve notational differences between programs. I'd hate to have to do this with any other notation even when hand-editing the raw file is an option (as with MusicXML and Lilypond). This is one of my biggest gripes with XML and the modern trend in web pages to push most of the formatting control into CSS style sheets (generally not editable by end users, nor compatible from one source to another).