EasyABC is a graphical music notation editor designed for creating, editing, viewing and playing music written in ABC notation. ABC is a text-based music notation system particularly popular for traditional and folk music, although it can represent a wide variety of musical styles.
The application combines a syntax-highlighted text editor with a graphical score display. As users enter or modify ABC notation, the corresponding sheet music is automatically updated, providing immediate visual feedback without leaving the editing environment.
EasyABC is particularly useful for musicians working with collections of tunes. It provides facilities for organising tune books, preparing printable sheet music, playing compositions and exchanging musical data with other applications.
It integrates established music processing tools, including abcm2ps and abc2midi, for score rendering and MIDI conversion.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- ABC notation editor with syntax highlighting, zoom controls and contextual guidance through ABC Assist.
- Select notes directly from the displayed score and insert musical symbols using toolbar menus.
- Import MusicXML, MIDI and Noteworthy Composer files.
- Export individual tunes or complete tune books to PDF, SVG and MIDI formats.
- Play compositions using SoundFont-based MIDI synthesis.
- Follow-score playback highlights notes as they are played.
- Record performances from a MIDI keyboard directly into the editor on supported platforms.
- Transpose musical passages and halve or double note lengths.
- Automatically align bars across different lines of music.
- Manage tune collections with sorting, automatic index renumbering and incipit generation.
- Search for musical note sequences independently of their key.
- Apply common ABC header fields to every tune in a collection.
- Supports UTF-8 and other character encodings.
- Multiple interface languages, including English, French, Italian, Danish, Dutch and Swedish.
- Cross-platform support – runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows.
Website: github.com/jwdj/EasyABC
Support:
Developer: Nils Liberg, Jan Wybren de Jong and contributors
License: GNU General Public License v2.0
EasyABC is written in Python. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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