EasyABC version 1.3.3
an open source ABC editor for Windows, OSX (including Lion) and Linux. It is published under the GNU Public License.

Features:
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Windows (11 MB)
Mac OSX (45 MB)
Download source code

Release notes

First of all I would like to thank Bendix Rødgaard and Frédéric Aupépin for their danish and french translations respectively. Thanks also to Chuck Boody who now provides universal binaries for abcMIDI and abcm2ps which means that EasyABC can run on Mac OSX Lion. This version features among other things tools for sorting the tunes and creating incipits. Open an ABC file and select Tools->View incipits in order to try it out.

It is now also possible to open multiple ABC files at the same time, and extended characters are handled better. If you were to suddenly start typing in chinese and then try to save the file EasyABC would ask you if you do not want to use utf-8 in case you had not already added an abc-charset field. New in this version is that a file that starts with "%abc-2.1" is assumed to be utf-8 encoded. See the change log for a complete list of all changes.

Introduction

The main window is divided into three resizable parts: a list of tunes, a musical score pane and the ABC code editor:

EasyABC screenshot

To get started add the following ABC code by copying and pasting it into the ABC Code editor: 

X: 1
T: My tune
K: C
CDEF | G2

You should see the musical score at the top and an item called "My tune" in the your tune list. When there are multiple tunes you can navigate to one by selecting it in this list. Single-click on a tune in the tune list to view it. Double-click on a tune in order to play it (or alternatively use the play button in the toolbar).

Typing in ABC code

A bar line in ABC is represented by the character |. Since many people may not be used to this character EasyABC provides an alternative way to enter it: simply hit the tab key.

Zoom

Zoom in and out using the toolbar zoom slider. You can also click on the note image to give it focus and then use [Ctrl]+mouse-wheel-up and [Ctrl]+mouse-wheel-down to zoom in and out. In order to change the font size in the ABC editor pane you can press [Ctrl] and + together to zoom in and [Ctrl] and - together to zoom out. Alternatively you can select "Change font" from the View menu which lets you specify both the face and size of the font.

Import/export

In order to add an abc, xml or midi file to the current tune collection, simply drag and drop the file onto the EasyABC window. There are options in the File menu for exporting either just the current tune or the entire file to midi, pdf, svg or html format.

Play

To play your tune, press the play button in the toolbar (or hit the F6 key - if you are a mac user then use Shift+F6). While the tune is being played two extra sliders representing tempo adjustment and playback position are displayed in the toolbar. Use the tempo adjustment slider to speed up or slow down the playback speed. Use the playback position to move for example from the start to the middle of the song. If you want to restore the tempo adjustment to its default value simply hold the Ctrl button pressed and click on the slider. If you want the playback to loop you can double-click on the Play button.

In case you want to audition the tune without hearing any repeats you can hold the Ctrl key pressed when clicking the play button.

Selecting notes

You can select a certain note or rest in the ABC code by clicking on its graphical representation (show me how). This makes it easy to navigate the ABC code since you get a link between the textual and graphical representation. You can select a range of notes by drawing a rectangle around them. Deselect all notes by clicking on any empty white part of the note image.

Inserting musical symbols

If you want to insert a musical symbol, then select the note that you want to associate it with by clicking on it in the music pane and then select the symbol from one of the drop-down menus in the toolbar.

Aligning bars

To align the bars (i.e. make all | characters line up) on all lines of the current tune select "Align bars" from the Edit menu. To align only certain lines select a subset of your ABC code lines before you choose "Align bars". If you don't like the alignment you can go back by selecting Undo from the Edit menu.

Transpose

In the Edit menu you find options for transposing the current tune up and down or for changing the note lengths and adjust the L: field. These functions use the abc2abc program to do the conversion.

Printing

You can print a tune by selecting File->Print. However, on Windows the quality is not very high due to a bug in the UI library used, which forced me to print the score as a bitmap. For high-quality print-outs you can export your file to PDF format first and print the PDF file. On Mac, if you are working with files containing foreign letters (like for example chinese) it may be easier to print directly from EasyABC or export to HTML/SVG rather than PDF since it's more difficult to get the fonts right with the PDF route.

Rearranging the user-interface

You can move each one of the three panes around if you click on its title ("Tune list", "ABC code" or "Musical score") and drag it somewhere else with the mouse. As you drag you will see a visual indication of where the pane will end up. You can also use the small buttons to the right of the caption of each pane to minimize/maximize/restore. In case you make some mistake and want to restore the default layout there is an option in the View menu that lets you do that easily. In the View menu you can also change the font used for the ABC editor.

Unicode support

ABC files are by default encoded using latin-1. If you want to use characters beyond that character set (eg. chinese or japanese ones) you can add a line saying %%abc-charset utf-8 at the top of your ABC file. EasyABC will automatically detect this upon loading and saving the file and will use utf-8 encoding instead.

If you have comments, questions or want to report a bug you are welcome to contact me at mail address:

Credits - software components used by EasyABC:

Links