ABC software that will work with Mac Catalina?

Hi - I’ve been using EasyABC but it’s stopped working with the OS upgrade. Is there anything that will work 64 bit?

The Tunebook app still works in 64 bit (http://www.jhlabs.com/tunebook/mac/). It crashes occasionally on Catalina, but at least it still functions. But it’s not quite the same as EasyABC and other editor/players, it seems to be more about keeping your tune list and being able to play tunes from it.

I don’t use a ton of ABC anymore, but I had a bit of the same problem. I was always a fan of BarFly, and MacOS Lion had killed it years ago. Phil actually resurrected it last year, but it was still only 32bit. So when I upgraded to Catalina, I actually built a virtual machine running Mojave in VMWare Fusion so I could still run a handful of 32 bit apps that didn’t have replacements, including BarFly.

Thanks for that Reverend! I will give Tunebook a try. Building a virtual machine is beyond my skills I think! 🙂

Building the VM isn’t hard, Rhod… With VMWare Fusion, I just dragged an old Mojave installer onto a new VM setup and it installed it for me, just like installing on a mac. But Fusion costs money. Never tried it with VirtualBox from Oracle, but I think you can do it. And VirtualBox is free. (I use VirtualBox for a lot of work stuff, because we can build our server environments locally for developing and testing code)… But I digress. Good luck with Tunebook! Hopefully some of the ABC developers hop on it pretty quickly and get us some 64 bit versions of the other apps…

I’m in the same boat - EasyABC is the preferred ABC editor. I like being able to produce tunebooks etc.

I don’t think you’ll be seeing a 64-bit edition any time soon on Mac. The application (and various dependencies) are kinda abandoned. There has been plenty of heads up in terms of continuing the support and building against 64-bit.

There are a number of online editors which allow you to work on a single tune at a time e.g. https://www.mandolintab.net/abcconverter.php

Other than that, I’ve resorted to using EasyABC on a PC/Windows.

EasyABC for the Mac - Experimental 64-bit builds

https://brsn.org.uk/easyabc/

Even the experimental 64 bit build is barely useable on Catalina. I have an old Mac mini that I’ve set up just for EasyABC but it’s painfully slow. I’ve no idea what’s involved but I wonder if we could crowdfund a few bob for someone to sort the 64 bit version?

Reverend: I’ve never upgraded from my Macintosh G4 (running OSX 10.2.8 Jaguar) so I’m still using the original BarFly.

My Mac is still going strong after 18 years and one PSU replacement!

I’d contribute to that, Bagpie. I love EasyABC. I’ve tried the 64bit experimental version on Catalina but it won’t even open.