[bjourne]

The main drawback of ABC notation is that it doesn't capture polyphonic music well but by the looks of it, Alda's notation doesn't either. You can write polyphonic music in ABC but it is clumsy. Another drawback is that the ABC language has warts and has accumulated some cruft. Which is to be expected since the notation was invented in the 1980's and have been incrementally improved since. The main advantage of ABC is that tens of thousands of songs have been notated in the format and that it is well-supported by lots of programs.

[testermelon]

> The main drawback of ABC notation is that it doesn't capture polyphonic music well but by the looks of it, Alda's notation doesn't either.

Do you happen to know any good textual notation for polyphonic composition?

[bjourne]

Due to the nature of the data, it is very hard to create good textual representations. The most practical I have seen are piano rolls and MIDI event notation.