the Craic 4+

Been using this for the last few years as I’ve gone down the rabbit hole of Old Time fiddle music. So many tunes to learn and so little time... Love the ability to do online searches and download straight from the program. Love having an easily portable memory bank cause I sure can’t remember all these tunes. Love being able to alter notes, add bowings, fingerings, ornamentations. Love being able to save a PDF or print it out to share with friends.

My only issue is when I’m editing first and second endings, I often do something that makes the program freeze up. But it’s not the end of the world. I just close out the program and boot it up again.

I have been using this ABC player, version 2.1, for many months, and strongly recommend it. It is simple and easy to use.

It is easy to add tunes to your library, either from the web, or by cut-and-paste from email, or manually by keyboard. The smart search makes it easy to find tunes in your library or on the web. The search will find partial matches as you type, and will match on any words in any title tag (T in ABC notation). I have many tunes with two title tags, where the second tag is the subtitle, and it is very handy to search across all titles and subtitles.

When playing a tune, the app will use the tempo specified in the ABC notation (the Q tag), which means you don’t need to fuss with the slider to adjust the tempo. I love that feature! If the tune doesn’t have a tempo specified, you can always use the slider. (One nice improvement would be to have a bigger slider, and I understand that is coming in another release. )

It is easy to email a tune to someone, open a tune as a PDF, open it as ABC notation for editing, or print it. Overall, it’s a great app.

Larry Hohm, Seattle

I started with the old app and loved that I could take my new tunes with me on my phone to learn and practice anywhere.

The new features made it that much easier. Now I can hear the tunes “at speed” (as I’d eventually play them) with the note stress feature. I’m also using it on my iPad to notate as well. Bravo Macaulay!