Mac / BarFly users beware…

Just a note to mention to you Mac users that OSX Lion, which is set to be released this month, will kill your ability to run BarFly as an ABC editor/player. I just installed the developer version of Lion on one of my laptops, and was surprised to see that I couldn’t run BarFly.

The Lion OS drops support for Rosetta, which is the software that Apple released when they first switched from PowerPC chips to Intel chips in Macs. Basically, Rosetta works as a translator to run old PPC applications on Intel Macs. But they’re finally trying to make the transition away from supporting the PPC architecture.

I have sent a note to Phil about BarFly, asking whether he’s got any plans for an Intel-native version.

But for the time being, if you rely on BarFly, I would recommend staying away from OSX Lion. (Other than that, it’s really a slick upgrade, with lots of neat features!)

I did hear back from Phil, and he isn’t going to be doing a new version, unfortunately.

What Version? 1.7.4 doesn’t say anything about using Rosetta in the get info.

Thaks for the heads up!

Yep, thanks Rev. Barfly is a good wee editor and i use it more than I admit, to myself. Must send Phil £20, I’m due him it!

I hate barflys, they have ruined many a session in my experience !
I also hate it when people gave names to something ( like Barfly ) which sounds interesting but doesn’t really give you a clue as to what it actually does; I call this alludial nomenclature, as it alludes to what it might be, but the actual meaning eludes you. There’s a shop down the road called Kites. What does it sell ? No, not kites, women’s clothing. Bought a nice ripstop nylon frock in there once though…..LOL.
I’m getting a bit off-topic here, time for another morning coffee.

This is very worrying. I use Barfly to generate the sheetmusic for The Session.

Thanks for the heads up, Reverend. I’m going to hold off upgrading to Lion until I can find another sheetmusic solution.

jeremy, hope you will let us know if you find a good solution, thanks.

It breaks all of the versions, cboody. It doesn’t mention needing Rosetta on Phil’s site, but it is all CarbonLib code, which is what Rosetta handles, unfortunately.

Are translations in english of this discussion available elsewhere 😉

BarFly is a very good program for editing and processing ABC notation - makes staff notation and sound files out of it as well as transposing, checking for errors and lots of other stuff. Originally developed for MacOS back when Macs used 68000 processors, updated to work on MacOS X for the PowerPC processor that used to be inside Macs.

Up to now, the Mac has been able to run that PowerPC code even thought it now has an Intel processor inside. But Apple is planning to drop the compatibility features in their operating system that makes this possible.

This will block essentially all the software I currently use from working, and BarFly in particular (which accounts for quite a lot of the time I spend in front of a computer). For the most part there are no alternatives that will run on their new improved operating system.

Apple are arseholes.

Jack - try Boot Camp. You can run your current OS and X.7 as a dual-boot, so you should be okay if you need newer applications as well as the older ones.

You can also run a virtual machine, and then run an older version of OSX Server on that, so that you don’t have to reboot. However, OSX Server is relatively expensive. There are hacks to be found on the net for ways to trick a VM into running a regular OSX install, which probably violates license agreements left and right. So you didn’t hear me suggest it. 😉

I think it’s reasonable for Apple to move on from supporting the PPC architecture. It will help keep their operating systems from suffering the same bloat that plagues Microsoft. It’s not just that Rosetta was an application that ran on its own, it actually tied into all of the code libraries which still had to support an architecture that they abandoned about 7 years ago. So it’s probably time to move on.

There are a bunch of coders who play Irish trad. We should talk them into making a new replacement for BarFly. If I had the time, I might tackle the problem myself, but I really don’t. There are other ABC editor/player/display apps out there that run on Mac (most of them seem to be Java-based, which may be the next thing to get axed by Apple, for all I know). But none of them do it nearly as well as BarFly. What I will miss the most is the “stress programs” and Concertina sound font, which allowed BarFly to actually sound somewhat recognizable as Irish music, when set up properly, as opposed to pretty much all the other midi players out there.

I’ve had good luck with Oracle’s Virtual Box for running Linux - it gets full access to the machine. The version I’m running still has some limitations, but it’s pretty good. Haven’t tried it for installing OSX, but since it’s free and pretty easy to use, it’s not much of a gamble to try it.

>There are a bunch of coders who play Irish trad. We should
>talk them into making a new replacement for BarFly

If Phil wanted to open-source it, that would make the conversion relatively simple, I imagine. I might even try to help out with that myself.
Rewriting from scratch, of course, would be more of a job.

Yeah, he might be open to that idea. Part of the problem is that it sounds like he was relying pretty heavily on some CarbonLib stuff. He was also asking me if Lion still supports QuickTime 7 and QuickTime Music, which he relies upon as well. That stuff is supported still, but I’m not sure for how long…

I sent Phil a message with a link to this thread, so maybe he’ll come chime in.

I hadn’t played with VirtualBox, but it does look like it also only (partially) supports OSX Server versions.

The problem with opensourcing it is that it’s written in Pascal and there is no Pascal compiler for Intel versions of MacOS. It would need a complete rewrite, and I suspect a lot of the code is gnarly beyond belief (I’ve been using it since very early on so I know what a lot of the bugfixes have had to do).

Hmmm, I thought they were keeping the GNU Pascal compiler up to date… But I don’t seem them having updated it for 10.7, so it might be that it was relying on CarbonLib too. 😏

I’m a long time user too. Even paid Phil, but I probably owe him more by now…

EasyABC supports abc2midi, and Seymour has just announced that he has implemented a version of the stress programming in the newest version. It is missing some very useful things (like renumbering the X files, and sorting a file) but continues to grow in capabilities. It might do for you Jeremy, since it exports pdf files very quickly and easily.

I hope Phil will reconsider. I’ve used Barfly for a long long time and hate to see its’ passing.

Oh! And no, I won’t translate this discussion. None of you help me with the Irish 🙂

Actually, I just checked EasyABC, and it doesn’t work properly on Lion either. It installs and launches just fine, but doesn’t display sheet music or play music.

I also sent an email off that direction as well.

It’s most likely an issue with the embedded libraries. And this one is probably fixable.

Whale oil, beef hooked. The pascal compilier is not installed under Charismatic Megafauna X.6. I guess it should be pretty easy to remedy that, but I think a re-write might easily include translation into a more modern language. There are plenty to choose from - and if you write to the JVM, you can use all of them. 🙂

In any event, having a previous codebase in hand wouldn’t hurt, even if it all gets ported to some other language: a lot of knowledge and descisions embedded in that stuff.

Purely academic on my part, I’m afraid, but it’s a nice thought.

I did communicate with Nils about EasyABC. And the first problem that we spotted is that the abcm2ps library is written in PPC native code, and suffers the same fate as BarFly.

Nils was able to re-compile abcm2ps for Intel, and I was able to get it installed into EasyABC, so that it now renders the sheet music properly.

But we’re running into the same problem with the abc2midi library. So stay tuned…

OK, with Nils’ help, I was able to get a version of EasyABC running under Lion.

He is going to see about getting it all compiled as Universal, so that a new release will work on all Macs. But at the very least, he is able to put together a package version that will work under Lion.

For the time being I am staying away from Intel Macs. I still have my G4 running Jaguar and that does fine for me!

I’ve still got my orange clamshell i-book with OS9. Great machine

I’ve got one of those in the bottom of a drawer somewhere. Power supply went out a few years ago. Great paperweight. 🙂

My power supply for that one is covered in gaffer tape

I just tried to install EasyABC. I can mount the DMG but it contains a greyed-out icon with a no-entry sign over it and says I can’t run that application on my system (which is Tiger on a G4 tower).

Has the attempt to support Lion meant that the PPC support has been trashed?

I really like the features that Phil has put into Barfly. It is obviously a program that concisely achieves what it set out to do, and does it well. I only started using it a year ago as before that I was PC based, so I sometimes wish it had an updated interface, but it is not something I shake my fists to the sky about ;)

It would be a real shame to see this software fall by the wayside, I hope Phil donates it to Open Source. Like Jon said, even a re-write in a modern language would be easy work for legions of adoring Barfly / ABC fans and dependents. I would volunteer!

I have often thought it was a shame that there were no Open Source solutions for ABC editing / playing / managing software, especially considering what an open community ITM is otherwise. If I were not such a hack handed software cowboy, I would have started something myself ;)

MapleLeafScot wrote:
> I have often thought it was a shame that there were
> no Open Source solutions for ABC editing / playing /
> managing software

Well, with EasyABC there is one now. Barfly seems to have some very nice features that EasyABC still lacks though, so I really hope Barfly will somehow stay around and be made to work on newer Mac operating systems.

@Jack Campin
Are you sure that the file was downloaded without problem? I think Chuck Boody tested it and he is using OSX 10.4 (PPC) if I remember correctly. If anyone else experiences the same problem then please let me know.

I really feel screwed by Apple on this one. Reminds we of when I had a d***ed Widows PC. Protools 9 won’t run, Barfly won’t run, TEF Player won’t run, the Alesis FST Connect I use to hook up to my HD24 recorder won’t work. That’s what I get for getting lulled into a false sense of security by trusting Apple.

As for Pascal compilers, what about “FreePascal” ? I know that it is used for at least one major program I use and it has no problem running on Intel or with generating Intel output. But, then back to the issues of having the source code in the first place…

I’ve used the open source Lilypond before, it should work on Mac, but may require a little fettling.

Files may be converted from abc to lilypond’s own .ly format by running abc2ly, and from there the files can be output in other formats.

Is there any ABC software I can get, for my the Mac, as BarFly no longer works on my new iMac? 🙁

Cheers,
Dick

Try EasyABC @ http://www.nilsliberg.se/ksp/easyabc This actually works better than Barfly

EasyABC it is Dick. And you’ll enjoy it. Drop a note here or off list if you have any problems getting going. I’ll be happy to help.

Have you any idea how many interest groups we’ve met on ?? 🙂

Chuck Boody

Nope, but it is Brian not Dick ):-}

Sorry Brian, my comment was aimed at Dick and apparently we cross posted.