I have all the musical talent of a brick. No, seriously. A dusty brick is more musical than me.
And a person’s got to know their limitations, so I tend to steer clear of anything music-related, if it doesn’t have a “play” button on it.
But the fun part of investigating all these little programs is finding gems like abcm2ps.
I know nothing — nada, zilch, zero — about musical notation or, for that matter, midi playback or conversion.
But with just a little bit of nudging and a quick search at abcnotation.com, and I get something that’s pretty cool — converting a short text file to something very visual.
But again, for all I know, that sheet music might actually just play random tones. I can’t read it. But the conversion looks pretty cool.
Now, my next attempt was to run the same stuff through abcmidi.
Not so much luck there. What I got, or what I tried to play, ended up being empty, which is usually a sign that I did something wrong.
I suppose, technically, in an ideal world, there should have been sound coming out of my computer from somewhere. But it wasn’t happening.
I don’t blame abcmidi though. If I had more knowledge about midi, or maybe abc notation, or maybe just about music, my results might have been more … cool. 😉