The ABC Music project

ABC, developed by Chris Walshaw, is a format designed to notate music using plain text. It was originally designed for folk tunes of Western European origin which can be written on one staff, but has since been extended to support the notation of complete, classical music scores.

Since its introduction at the end of 1991, ABC has become very popular. Programs on many operating systems use ABC as an input and/or output format. There are programs which produce printed sheet music or allow for computer performances, search in tune databases, or that analyze tunes in some way.

The aim of this project is to promote the ABC language by maintaining the ABC standard and a set of software and source code that manipulate and present music written in ABC.

On this site, you can find among others:

• The ABC standard (maintainer: Irwin Oppenheim)
• resources: ABC resources on the web
• abcMIDI (maintainer: Seymour Shlien): It contains among other things a tool for creating MIDI output, and a tool for transposing tunes.
• iabc (maintainer: Aaron Newman): a graphical, interactive, and cross-platform ABC editor
• jcabc2ps (maintainer: John Chambers): an ABC to PostScript convertor
• The Nottingham Music Database (maintainer: James Allwright): an ABC version of this tune collection

You can download files, access the CVS repository, use the bug reporting system, etc. from the Project Summary Page.

The ABC Music project is grateful to Bert Van Vreckem for designing and maintaining this website.