I've got a travel-size violin (by [Bill Whipple]) that I mess around
with.  I like a lot of traditional and celtic music, and I wanted
something that would provide both a visual and aural rendition of a
song to help me learn it.

Looking around, I found [ABC][] (see John Chamber's [page][JC] and
[tutorial][]), which is a simple, ASCII notation for sheet music.
There are lots of [software tools][] for processing ABC; my favorite
is [abcMIDI][] (which I've packaged in my [[Gentoo overlay]] and is
also packaged in the [Sunrise overlay][]).  `abcMIDI` provides several
useful programs:

* `abc2midi`: ABC to MIDI conversion, to listen to your music.
* `yaps`: ABC to PostScript conversion, to look at your music.
* `midi2abc`: MIDI to ABC conversion, when you can't find ABC source.

My favorite ABC tune repository is [The Session][], but there are also
search tools and repositories listed on the [ABC homepage][ABC] and
[JC's page][JC].

To make playing ABC files as easy as possible, I've written a little
script, [[abcplay.py]], which uses `abc2midi` to generate a MIDI file
for each tune and then plays them with [timidity++][].  Because the
processing is so similar, `abcplay.py` also plays [LilyPond][] files,
using `lilypond` to convert them to MIDI.  Run

    $ abcplay.py --help

for usage information.

[Bill Whipple]: http://www.wiplstix.com/
[ABC]: http://abcnotation.com/
[JC]: http://ecf-guest.mit.edu/~jc/music/abc/
[tutorial]: http://ecf-guest.mit.edu/~jc/music/abc/doc/ABCtutorial.html
[software tools]: http://abcnotation.com/software
[abcMIDI]: http://abc.sourceforge.net/abcMIDI/
[Sunrise overlay]: http://overlays.gentoo.org/proj/sunrise
[The Session]: http://www.thesession.org/
[timidity++]: http://timidity.sourceforge.net/
[LilyPond]: http://lilypond.org/

[[!tag tags/fun]]
[[!tag tags/python]]
[[!tag tags/tools]]