Ernie

• An ABC musical notation utility for Mac OS X •
Copyright © 2011, Edward K. Chew, All rights reserved.

About Ernie

Ernie is an application for composing musical scores using the popular ABC notation. I wrote this out of desperation after discovering several other similar applications had stopped working when I upgraded to Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion). Thankfully, a number of excellent command line tools for rendering ABC had survived the transition intact, including abcm2ps and the abcMIDI tools suite. Ernie is simply a graphical front-end to these wonderful tools.

The current version is 1.0b8, which you can download here.

Why “Ernie” you might ask? Well, Ernie knows his ABCs, doesn’t he?

System Requirements

I have compiled Ernie with a target of Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) or later. That said, I have only tested it under 10.6 and 10.7. (It is not suitable for PowerPC machines, but then there are a fair number of ABC apps for those in circulation. I was partial to Skink myself.)

Usage

When you run Ernie, you are presented with a text editor window that has 3 buttons running along the top left: PDF, MIDI, and Transpose… What you do at this point is:

Type up a tune in ABC.
Save your file. (This is important. I’ll get to it in a moment.)
Press any of the 3 buttons.

The PDF button generates a PDF sheet music file out of your ABC text and brings it up for display in its own window. You can then print this window if you like. (I had originally considered loading the sheet music into a split pane within the ABC window like I've seen other applications do, but decided I prefer separate windows like this. It's nice to be able to see a whole page of music at a glance and resize it on its own as much as you like. It encourages me to whip out the fiddle and give it a run before I even send it to the printer.)

The MIDI button generates a MIDI file from the ABC and brings it up in a QuickTime widget. It sounds awful, of course, but it's generally good enough to tell you if you made some mistakes entering the notes or chords. (There are supposedly some directives you can add to your ABC to select MIDI instruments and so forth. I haven't played around with that myself. If I want to work on the MIDI a bit, I usually bring it into GarageBand and mess around with the tracks there instead.)

Note that if you close an ABC file, any PDF or MIDI window associated with it will close as well.

The Transpose… button lets you raise or lower the key by up to 12 semitones (a full octave). The transposed ABC then appears in a separate window, rather than overwriting the original one. You should probably save this when you get a moment.

Saving is very important to Ernie. Ernie wants you to save everything! The reason is that he puts those other files like the PDF and the MIDI in the same folder alongside your ABC file, and if you have never saved your ABC, there is no natural location for the other stuff. This makes Ernie sad and confused. The nice thing about this approach is that you automatically have these PDF and MIDI files lying around that you can email to your friends and what not. (I may at some point, however, come up with a scheme to store unsaved files at some temporary location to relax this restriction—it might be nice for quickly sampling tunes you find online, for example—but that’s the way it works right now.)

Over to the upper right of the ABC window, there is one final button: Log. This launches into Mac OS X's Console utility and brings up a running log of anything Ernie is on about. Generally, you would only need to look here if something is not right. You may get some indication of where you made mistakes in your ABC code, for example.

One final note. There are keyboard shortcuts to the four buttons: command-shift-P for PDF, command-shift-M for MIDI, command-shift-T for transpose, and command-shift-L for log.

Licensing

Ernie is free and may be distributed but not be sold without the author’s permission. (Contact me at ekc•lgl.kos.net for more information.)

(If you are feeling generous, please offer a donation to the people who wrote the command line tools on which it is based. They really did most of the work.)

Version History

Version	Changes
v1.0b8	Ernie should now always save ABC files in UTF-8 format. (There had been some issues with certain special characters like the © symbol not getting saved properly.)
v1.0b7	Ernie should no longer be incompatible with early Intel Core Duo Macs. Fixed an error-reporting glitch with MIDI.
v1.0b6	Moved MIDI playback into the ABC window. Can select which music will play from ABC files that have more than one X: tag. Error reporting and log format improvements.
v1.0b5	Fixed another bug that sometimes crashed Ernie on closing files. MIDI player now starts playing automatically when you press MIDI.
v1.0b4	Worked on a bug that was crashing the MIDI player. Default new abc file now sets the M: tag to C (for common time). Added Ernie icons to the app.
v1.0b3	First version released to the wild.

Known Issues

"Double quotation marks" in file names (or paths, for that matter) are trouble. (They won't be escaped properly on the command line.)
There may be some circumstances in which a PDF window loses its connection to its parent ABC window.
Better integration between log diagnostics and ABC source when errors come up would be useful.
Need to add preference saving, menu functions, etc.

(Note that problems with rendering PDFs, MIDIs, and transposing may be due to the command line tools over which I have little control. I know…it's a cop out.)