flabc is an editor for abc text files that is based on the cross platform C++ GUI toolkit FLTK. For converting abc files to postscript/pdf or midi it relies on the additional external software abctab2ps and abc2midi.
Prerequisites:
- C++98 compiler with STL support. Compilation has been tested with clang on MacOS X, gcc on Linux, and MingW on Windows
- GNU make
- FLTK 1.3.3 or later (on OSX: 1.3.4 or later), see https://www.fltk.org/
To compile flabc from the source code package, change to the subdirectory src and type make. To install it on Linux, type ($ is the shell prompt):
$ sudo make install
If you ever need to uninstall flabc, type sudo make uninstall. Alternatively, you can use the ESP Package Manager epm (see https://www.msweet.org/epm/), to create a RPM or DEB package and install it (replace "platform" with your processor type and "x.y.z" with the current version of flabc):
$ # on rpm based systems like Red Hat or Suse:
$ make rpm
$ sudo rpm -i linux-platform/flabc-x.y.z.rpm
$ # on deb based systems like Debian or Ubuntu:
$ sudo make deb
$ sudo dpkg -i linux-platform/flabc-x.y.z.rpm
Note that flabc is only an editor for abc files. You must additionally install software that actually processes abc files like
- abctab2ps: http://www.lautengesellschaft.de/cdmm/
- abcm2ps: https://github.com/leesavide/abcm2ps
- abc2midi: http://abc.sourceforge.net/abcMIDI/
To create an OSX application bundle flabc.app, you can use the script makeosxapp in the root directory of this package. Note that you can also copy the abctab2ps, abcm2ps, and abc2midi binaries to the subdirectory flabc.app/Contents/Resources/bin in order to obtain a self-sufficient application bundle.
To create a Windows binary installer with InnoSetup (see https://jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php), you can use the script makewindist. You should, however, before copy the binaries of abctab2ps, abcm2ps, and abc2midi to winapp/bin beforehand, because on Windows binaries are not installed in standard directories and thus cannot automatically be found by flabc.
File releases and precompiled binary installers for different platforms are available from http://www.lautengesellschaft.de/cdmm/. These packages typically also include the helper programs abctab2ps, abcm2ps, and abc2midi.
The main menu is accessible with the "Alt" key on Linux/Win32 and with the "Ctrl + Alt" key on OSX. Hence the keyboard shortcut for listening to a tune is "Ctrl + Alt + A, L" on OSX and "Alt + A, L" on Linux.
On OSX you can drag & drop files on flabc. Alternatively you can open an abc file 'bla.abc' from the command line with "open -a flabc 'bla.abc'" when you have moced the application bundle to some standard application directory (eg. /Applications).
When previewing or listening does not work check whether something is wrong with the settings under "Options/System Environment". On OSX the folder Contents/Resources/bin in the application bundle is added to the search path by flabc automatically. It contains a helper script "psview" that calls ghostscript for PDF conversion and opens the PDF with Preview. This requires ghostscript to be installed.
Copyright (c) 2006-2022 by Christoph Dalitz
Official home page of flabc and abctab2ps: http://www.lautengesellschaft.de/cdmm/
For licensing information, see the file LICENSE for details.