iabc

Latest Release (0.8) 10/9/2003

It’s been a long time since my last release of iabc.  In the last 6 months, I’ve had a new baby, moved to California from Illinois, and starting teaching a programming class (in addition to my engineering work).  The disruption has been, well, kind of disrupting.  I hope to have at least one more release this year.

 

The following features have been added for this release of iabc:

• Probably the biggest change is the addition of ‘score mode’ and ‘part mode’, which allows you to create a piece and print out individual parts.  This is available under the ‘view’ menu.
• V: header now honors the transpose and octave fields, in addition to the program and volume (midi) fields implemented in the last release:

V: bass transpose=-2 octave=-1.  As per the 2.0 draft standard, the transposition is display-only. The transposition is also not done in ‘score’ mode (I’m assuming here that most people would want to look at scores in concert pitch).  One day soon I will provide dialog-box settings for this.

• Alt-v (refresh) now works in a more intuitive way.  The piece is re-read if the buffer has changed and the cursor stays more-or-less where it is.
• Iabc makes some attempt at keeping you from blowing away your work when you open a new file, or exit the program.

 

I didn’t implement the V: fields in the K: field also, even though it’s in the standard.  I don’t like this, since K: is really a tune-wide parameter and so things in there should really apply to all voices, plus, there are many non-standard things in the K: field in many tunes which are difficult to parse.

 

As usual, the Linux port lags behind the Windows port.  Since I am now using wxWindows 2.4.2, I need to upgrade my gcc to 3.3.1, which means I need to upgrade binutils, libgcc, etc. – in short I need to purchase a newer Redhat CD.  After wasting an entire day tracing down various rpms, I gave up.

 

I built this version using the .NET compiler environment (e.g. DevStudio 7.0).  The requirements for templates changed, so the map and list classes may need some tweaking if you want to build them under 6.0.   Really, you should be able to replace them with the map and list classes from the last version if you want.