🎵 ABC Composer

For those who want to try composing / making music with ABC notation — this tool watches your .abc files and renders them in real time into PDF and MP3 using MuseScore CLI.

It supports both interleaved and regular ABC formats. Further features remain to be explored 🚀

🧩 Requirements

• Python ≥ 3.8
• MuseScore 4 (CLI accessible as mscore) Optional:
• ffmpeg – for MP3 export

🚀 Usage

Render all .abc files in real time:

python watch.py

Specify custom directories or options:

def parse_args() -> argparse.Namespace:
    ap = argparse.ArgumentParser(prog="watch_abc", description="Realtime ABC → MusicXML → PDF/MP3")
    ap.add_argument("--src", type=Path, default=ROOT, help="Source directory (default: script dir)")
    ap.add_argument("--out", type=Path, default=ROOT / "build", help="Output directory (default: ./build)")
    ap.add_argument("--mscore", type=str, default=None, help="MuseScore CLI path (overrides detection)")
    ap.add_argument("--python", type=str, default=sys.executable, help="Python executable to run abc2xml.py")
    ap.add_argument("--interval", type=float, default=2.0, help="Seconds between scans (default 2s)")
    ap.add_argument("--no-audio", action="store_true", help="Disable audio export")
    ap.add_argument("--quiet", action="store_true", help="Silent batch build (no tqdm)")
    return ap.parse_args()

📚 Resources

• MIT Easy ABC Guide
• NotABC Online Editor
• ABC Standard v2.1

Example datasets:

• 🎻 Kunst der Fuge – Classical pieces
• 🎵 ABC Notation Collection – Folk and traditional tunes

License MIT License © 2025 Langchu Huang