New open-source, client-side ABC to Notation Converter
Posted: Thu Feb 09, 2023 10:13 pm
Hi y'all,
For many years I was using the mandolintab.net online ABC converter for most of my ABC transcription needs. If I ever sent out a PDF of a tune, it was probably generated using that site.
A few months ago that website went down. The guy who runs it is nowhere to be found.
I decided that the world needed a robust ABC-to-notation conversion program that was completely free, open source, ran completely self-contained in the browser, with no need to rely on anyone else's server. While there are dedicated programs like EasyABC that are very sophisticated, I wanted something I could run from anywhere in any web browser.
I wanted to build a converter that could produce a wide variety of outputs, including standard notation, notation plus note names, mandolin and guitar tab (both standard and DADGAD), even whistle fingering tab.
After a manic week, and lot and lots of incremental updates, it's really working well:
http://michaeleskin.com/abctools/abctools.html
There is an Instructions link at the top of the page that explains how to use it.
A few demo videos:
https://youtu.be/vWoDCb3-n2M
https://youtu.be/A_arBse7u5Q
https://youtu.be/jr1EC4l7RgQ
The project source code is available at:
https://github.com/seisiuneer/abctools
and is available for anyone to modify, or just download and run on your own system, no server required. The code is completely self contained, written in HTML + Javascript + CSS and run completely in your browser. It even works on iPhones and iPads.
It's very fast. I've been able to export the PDF for my 52 tune B/C box book in less than 2 minutes. I would say probably 100 tunes at one time would be the max I'd throw at it.
It's primarily focused on traditional Irish music as far as the sorts of testing I've done with it, but it should be able to deal with most fairly straightforward ABC like you'd grab from thesession.org and other sites. There may be more exotic features of ABC it doesn't support, I'm limited by the capabilities of the underlying open-source libraries I used to create it.
Please let anyone else who might find it useful know about the tool!
If you run into any nasty issues, please let me know. It works best on Chrome and Firefox, but has occasional rendering issues (mostly with ornamentation) on Safari.
See you around the session!
Michael
For many years I was using the mandolintab.net online ABC converter for most of my ABC transcription needs. If I ever sent out a PDF of a tune, it was probably generated using that site.
A few months ago that website went down. The guy who runs it is nowhere to be found.
I decided that the world needed a robust ABC-to-notation conversion program that was completely free, open source, ran completely self-contained in the browser, with no need to rely on anyone else's server. While there are dedicated programs like EasyABC that are very sophisticated, I wanted something I could run from anywhere in any web browser.
I wanted to build a converter that could produce a wide variety of outputs, including standard notation, notation plus note names, mandolin and guitar tab (both standard and DADGAD), even whistle fingering tab.
After a manic week, and lot and lots of incremental updates, it's really working well:
http://michaeleskin.com/abctools/abctools.html
There is an Instructions link at the top of the page that explains how to use it.
A few demo videos:
https://youtu.be/vWoDCb3-n2M
https://youtu.be/A_arBse7u5Q
https://youtu.be/jr1EC4l7RgQ
The project source code is available at:
https://github.com/seisiuneer/abctools
and is available for anyone to modify, or just download and run on your own system, no server required. The code is completely self contained, written in HTML + Javascript + CSS and run completely in your browser. It even works on iPhones and iPads.
It's very fast. I've been able to export the PDF for my 52 tune B/C box book in less than 2 minutes. I would say probably 100 tunes at one time would be the max I'd throw at it.
It's primarily focused on traditional Irish music as far as the sorts of testing I've done with it, but it should be able to deal with most fairly straightforward ABC like you'd grab from thesession.org and other sites. There may be more exotic features of ABC it doesn't support, I'm limited by the capabilities of the underlying open-source libraries I used to create it.
Please let anyone else who might find it useful know about the tool!
If you run into any nasty issues, please let me know. It works best on Chrome and Firefox, but has occasional rendering issues (mostly with ornamentation) on Safari.
See you around the session!
Michael