The abc format is a new way of writing music using only ASCII text symbols. It was
invented by Chris Walshaw as an easy way of transcribing folk music, and is still
being developed. Eventually, it should be possible to represent any music as abc.
As a computer file format it is extremely efficient (you can store thousands of
tunes on a single floppy disk), but it is not just a computer file format; with
a little practice it is perfectly easy to sight-read, and if you need to write
down some music and don't have any manuscript paper to hand, it's a very useful
pencil-and-paper language too. For a full description of the language, pointers
to other software and to sites with tunes in abc format, go to:
<http://www.gre.ac.uk/~c.walshaw/abc/>
Virtual Composer can output the contents of the edited file as abc. Select ╥Save As...╙ and click on the ╥Format:╙ pop-up menu on the file-save dialog to select the abc save option. The abc output of Virtual Composer, is optimised for use with Phil Taylor╒s abc music program, BarFly. (See credits below for download link and the included abc folder) As such, please note that it uses several extensions which only BarFly knows about. In particular, trills, mordents, fermatas and some other features may not be available if you use a generic abc program. The abc output of Virtual Composer should be easily understood by BarFly, with little or no editing. If your Virtual Composer score contains more than one channels, when you import Virtual Composer╒s output to BarFly, select ╥Align Voices╙ so that the score displays correctly. You can also edit the output to include more than one bar per line. Since Virtual Composer has no way of knowing how long your bars will be, it defaults to generating one bar per line.
The included abc files, are Virtual Composer's output for some of the pieces by Bach which are included in the folder "Examples".
(Note that BarFly does not handle correctly the output for the file Minuet I, because of a small bug, so Phil Taylor edited it slightly to be handled correctly. The correct output is called "Minuet I(edited).abc)
