User:Halftheisland/ABC

Description
ABC Notation is a text-based (ASCII) musical notation format commonly used for folk and traditional music. It is an alphabetical shorthand, using the letters A to G to represent notes and other numbers and symbols to represent note length, sharps, flats, ornaments, etc.

While alphabetical notation systems have been used informally for a number of years, the current standard is based on work done by Chris Walshaw in the early 1990s and later revised and extended by a number of other users. The current standard is v2.1 (December 2011), with a draft v2.1.1 standard published in February 2013.

Information
ABC files consist of two basic parts - the header and the notes. The header contains metadata and other information such as the key, meter and standard note length of the tune.

Header
The header of an ABC file consists of a number of fields defining metadata and other information. A complete header using every field might look like this:

X:1

T:Sample Song

C:A. Composer

O:America; Nebraska; Power Cable.

A:Area

M:6/8

L:1/4

Q:"Allegro" 1/4=120

P:ABAB

Z:Tran Scriber, 

N:Notes

G:Group

H:This song was traditionally played

+:at the Power Cable, Nebraska Boot Festival

K:D minor

Let's break this down field by field.


 * X is the reference number. As ABC files can contain a number of tunes, this is used to identify the first, second, third, etc. tunes in the file. Thus, the first tune would be X:1, the second X:2, and so on.


 * T is the song title. As you would expect, this is used to store the title of the song.


 * C is the composer. Again, as expected, this contains the name of the composer (or, e.g. "Trad." for traditional songs where the original composer's name is lost)


 * M is the meter.

Standards
The most current version of the ABC standard can be found at http://abcnotation.com/wiki/abc:standard

Specific versions of the standard can be found at the following:


 * ABC Standard v1.6 (January 1997)
 * ABC Draft Standard v1.7.6 (May 2000)
 * ABC Draft Standard v2.0 (August 2003)
 * ABC Standard v2.0 (December 2010)
 * ABC Standard v2.1 (December 2011)
 * ABC Draft Standard v2.1.1 (February 2013)

A route map of proposed developments and list of draft proposals are also available.