[itsme]

Thanks for the Schacherl link. I know of many good explanations for ABC format, but this one was new to me.

Reading the ASCII representation is not a strange idea of mine, it seems to be used regularly by experienced ABC users (what I am not yet).
See http://www.pghardy.net/concertina/tunebo...index.html
The "incipit" column in that index shows the first few measures of the tunes in "Paul Hardy's Session Tunebook".

If someone is interested: I have converted Paul Hardy's Session Tunebook 2016 to MuseScore and added links to the MSCZ files into the PDF.