Folktab.com is down? .ABC and notation transcribing site.

[Simon DS]

I've noticed a lot of internet anti-social behaviour in the last week, anyone have any luck with this site?

https://folktab.com/

[MikeEdgerton]

That happens when a web site owner fails to pay the registration on their domain name. They are given a certain amount of grace time and then anyone can buy the name. It happens to large companies on occasion as well. For those of us in the corporate world that live and die by our e-mail domains we are generally on top of it and pay a little extra for services that will prevent this from happening. There can be many reasons why this happens. Perhaps the owner of the domain name has passed away or no longer is interested in paying to host the site. They could have also changed their e-mail address and not transferred that information to their registrar. They weren't hacked, that is a common practice among companies that grab domain names when they become available and make a profit selling them back to the people who messed up. It's part of the online business experience and has been for years.

[wsugai]

Does anyone know of another site that does online ABC -> mandolin tab conversion?

I became aware of folktab.com when mandolintab.net went down a while ago. Such a loss.

[vonbiber]

Does anyone know of another site that does online ABC -> mandolin tab conversion?

http://michaeleskin.com/abctools/abctools.html

[Mandolin Deep Cuts]

@wsugai I use a MuseScore, and there’s a free plugin that imports ABC to standard notation. I then convert the dots to tabs. The whole process takes around 10 mouse clicks. I can write it up if it’s helpful.

[Eric Platt]

@wsugai I use a MuseScore, and there’s a free plugin that imports ABC to standard notation. I then convert the dots to tabs. The whole process takes around 10 mouse clicks. I can write it up if it’s helpful.

Wouldn't mind if you did that as I use MuseScore. (Still miss mandolintab.net as it was easy for me to transpose tunes).

[grimalkin]

Wouldn't mind if you did that as I use MuseScore. (Still miss mandolintab.net as it was easy for me to transpose tunes).

I would love to see these instructions, as well. I've tried to do this conversion before, but am not very familiar with MuseScore, and haven't had much (any) success.

[wsugai]

See vonbiber's June 4th post above recommending:

http://michaeleskin.com/abctools/abctools.html

IMHO, abctools does an even better job on abc -> mando tab conversion than folktab.com used to do.

[grimalkin]

@wsugai I use a MuseScore, and there’s a free plugin that imports ABC to standard notation. I then convert the dots to tabs. The whole process takes around 10 mouse clicks. I can write it up if it’s helpful.

I've got to the point where I can get the dots in MuseScore, but then when I go to Edit -> Instruments and select mandolin, then add that, I just get empty tabs. I feel like I'm missing something obvious, but I'm not sure what.

[grimalkin]

Wouldn't mind if you did that as I use MuseScore. (Still miss mandolintab.net as it was easy for me to transpose tunes).

I figured it out. This is on Debian Linux, using the current package version (3.2, IIRC). The only caveat is you have to install the ABC Import/Export plugin, which can be found here:
https://musescore.org/en/project/abc-importexport

That requires downloading abc2xml and xml2abc. I had to make some tweaks to figure out how to make them work, including making them executable. Probably simpler on Windows. I may have also had to edit the first line calling python, as my system has an executable called python3 but not one called python. I put the plugin directory inside /usr/share/mscore-3.2/plugins but I think it could also have gone into ~/Documents/MuseScore3/Plugins.

Once you enable that plugin it's pretty simple.

Click Plugins -> ABC ImpEx, then load the ABC from a file or paste it in.
Click Import
You should now have the dots
Click ctrl+a to select all the dots, then ctrl+c to copy them (or do whatever you'd do to select all and copy)
Click Edit -> Instruments (or just hit the "i" button) to bring up the Instruments dialog
Search for your instrument or choose it from the menu (caveat - the default menu shows "common" instruments, so click "all" to see all - search works without doing that)
Click Add to score
You'll have an empty tab below your dots now
Click the beginning of that tab, then paste (ctrl+v on PCs)