New Hampshire Country Dance Fiddle Tunes Website

A Few abc Notation Supplements & Utilities

About the supplements & utilities. I made these up for my own use. I make no claim to expertise with either abc or spreadsheets, but I find the abc help files and spreadsheet utilities useful and perhaps someone else will too.

An abc Help File

• Peter Yarensky's abc 2.2 Help File v2.0. A roughly 25-page PDF covering some of the basics of using abc notation and some of the advanced techniques used in this website, including Playable Tunes.
• abc 2.2 Reference Card v1.5. A two-page PDF that focuses on things that I'd find myself having to look up.
• Finally, the Example File as a Text File and as an HTML Document. This illustrates many techniques and is an example of a playable tune in an HTML document. The text file lets you look at the source code more easily; the html file displays the tune. If the tune doesn't display, try downloading the html file and opening it in your browser.

The spreadsheets were done in iWork Numbers. Numbers can be quite slow, and it doesn't have the power of Excel but I find that the ability to have multiple independent tables per sheet and ease of use makes it preferable.

Numbers and Pages are free on a Mac, iPhone or iPad. If you use something else, it's still free: all you need is a free Apple ID. Go to icloud.com, log in, and you can use the online versions of Numbers and Pages (and several other apps).

• Chord Book Template. This document may be used to start a new chord book, e.g. from chords you obtain using the next spreadsheet. It is in Pages. Again if you don't have Pages you may use it online with an Apple ID.
• Sort Tunes 3.0. Paste in up to 1500 lines of abc code and sort the tunes by as many fields as you want. Optionally you may specify a header to go at the beginning of the document and section headers to go before each new tune category. Note: this spreadsheet is fairly slow (although a lot faster than doing it by hand!), so for smaller numbers of tunes try the 500-line version: Sort Tunes 3.0, Short.
• Extract Chords from abc File 4.0. Paste in up to 350 lines of abc code and the spreadsheet extracts the chords and formats them for use in a chord book or listing.
• Chord & Bass Line Chart Transposition 2.0. This Numbers spreadsheet transposes a set of chord & bass names (e.g. G7/D) to the desired key. It can handle one chord/measure, although it doesn't seem to be bothered by some extraneous text.
• The next two spreadsheets aren't specific to abc notation but I find them to be quite handy.
• List Unique Items From a List Without Gaps. This spreadsheet utility takes a list with duplicate items, filters out the duplicates, and lists the distinct items in a column without gaps.
• Divide Text into Two to Four Segments Based on Separators. If you have text that you want to divide into two to four segments based on common separators this can probably handle it.