that could facilitate the sharing of music online, and also added a new and simple language for software developers, not unlike other notations designed for ease, such as tablature and solfège.
The earlier ABC notation was built on, standardized, and changed by Chris Walshaw to better fit the keyboard and an ASCII character set, with the help and input of others.
Such software is readily available for most computer systems, including Microsoft Windows, Unix / Linux, Macintosh, Palm OS, and web-based.
[2] Later third-party software packages have provided direct output, bypassing the TeX typesetter,[3] and have extended the syntax to support lyrics aligned with notes,[4] multi-voice and multi-staff notation,[5] tablature,[6] and MIDI.
In the 1980s Chris Walshaw began writing out fragments of folk / traditional tunes using letters to represent the notes before he learned standard Western music notation.
[11] It is a textual description of ABC syntax, cleaning up many of the ambiguities of the 2.0 Draft Standard, which, in turn, was grown from the 1996 User Guide of version 1.6 of Chris Walshaw's original "abc2mtex".
After much discussion on the ABC users mailing list, a draft standard (nominal version 1.7.6) was eventually produced in August 2000, but was never officially released.