BarFly

Abc is a system of notation for music which uses ordinary ASCII text to represent the symbols which you would normally write on music manuscript. It is simple, human-readable, and if you can touch type it is much faster to enter abc at the keyboard than it is to use a graphical music program to place notes on a staff using the mouse. Because it's plain old ASCII, you can use it to post music to newsgroups (it's very bad netiquette to post MIDI, GIF or other binary files to text-only newsgroups) email tunes to your friends, or use it as a highly efficient way of storing music (you can store thousands of tunes on a single floppy disk).

At heart the program is a text editor; it works just like any other text editor - it will open multiple files in separate windows, and let you copy and paste text between them. It has all the usual editing commands, Cut, Copy, Paste, Clear and Undo plus Search/Replace and there's also a routine to recursively search through all the text files and folders in a directory. It can work with megabyte-sized files (if you have enough memory), and you can use it for pretty much anything you would normally do with a text editor.

If the text being edited contains abc tunes, however, a whole array of different options becomes available. The tunes can be embedded in ordinary text, as the program locates them by looking for the X: field. It considers the tune to end at the first blank line following the K: field, and ignores any text in between tunes. When opening files it counts the tunes present and displays the number at the top of the window. You select a tune by placing the text insertion point anywhere within it. You can then perform various operations on it, for example play it. Tunes play in the background, so you can go on editing the file while a tune is playing, and even edit the tune which is actually playing, although changes which you make will not be audible until the next time you play it.