In another exciting development for abc, Gregory Dyke and Paul Rosen have just released their javascript abc renderer, abcjs.
What the heck does that mean … and why is it exciting?
Well, up until now, if you wanted to display an abc tune, together with the score (the dots) it represents, on a webpage, you would have to produce the dots as a separate file beforehand and insert it into the page as an image.
Now, provided abcjs is installed in the page, you just have to paste in the abc notation and it does the rest.
It even produces a midi player to listen to the tune.
Why is that exciting?
Well for a start it makes it much easier to put abc tunes on a website. And perhaps more importantly, now any site that can accept input from visitors, such as wikis, blogs (via comments), forums, bulletin boards, etc, can install abcjs and snippets of abc will automatically get translated into dots and sound.
In fact, I’ve already installed it in the forums on this site – it took less than 5 minutes!
Obviously, this is of most interest to website developers, but I’m willing to bet that a number of sites start to use it, making it even easier to discuss and share tunes.
Chris
Tags: abc, development, javascript, midi player, Tunes, Website