At heart the program is a text editor; it works just like any other text editor - it will open multiple files in separate windows, and let you copy and paste text between them. It has all the usual editing commands, Cut, Copy, Paste, Clear and Undo plus Search/Replace and there's also a routine to recursively search through all the text files and folders in a directory. It can work with megabyte-sized files (if you have enough memory), and you can use it for pretty much anything you would normally do with a text editor. (I'm writing the HTML source for these pages using it - isn't that incestuous?)
If the text being edited contains abc tunes, however, a whole array of different options becomes available. The tunes can be embedded in ordinary text, as the program locates them by looking for the X: field. It considers the tune to end at the first blank line following the K: field, and ignores any text in between tunes. When opening files it counts the tunes present and displays the number at the top of the window. You select a tune by placing the text insertion point anywhere within it. You can then perform various operations on it, for example play it. Tunes play in the background, so you can go on editing the file while a tune is playing, and even edit the tune which is actually playing, although changes which you make will not be audible until the next time you play it.
Each open window can display its contents in two different modes. By default, newly-opened windows are in text mode, but if there are any abc tunes present you can switch to split-screen mode. Here the window is divided horizontally into three panes; the top pane contains a picture of the current tune displayed in music notation, the middle pane contains the text and the bottom pane contains an index of all the tune titles in the file. The text pane still contains the entire text of the file, but is scrolled so that the top of the current tune is in view. The text remains editable, and any changes which you make to the text are instantly reflected in the music pane. If you click on a note in the music pane, the equivalent characters in the text are automatically selected, which makes navigation around the tune very easy. Clicking on a tune name in the index selects that tune and switches the whole display to show it. You can change the size of the panes by clicking and dragging on the partitions which separate them, for example to see more of the music pane at the expense of the text and index panes.
The music is always displayed fully-justified. I don't have much use for un-justified music as it just looks ugly. A possible exception to this is where a tune or part of a tune has a short last line, and in future I may allow this to be un-justified to prevent the notes being spread out to occupy a full line. The music can be printed or copied to the clipboard for transfer to another program. PowerMac users can export pictures of the music to a file in a multitude of different graphics formats (older 680x0 machines can use only the PICT format). You can export the sounds as AIFF audio, Standard MIDI or Quicktime movie.
The program conforms completely to the abc v1.6 definition, can handle extremely complex single-voice constructions, and also supports a number of extensions to abc, It also conforms as far as possible with the Apple User Interface guidelines, which means that everything works in the way which Mac users have come to expect.
© 1998 Phil Taylor. All rights
reserved.
