I'm astonished to hear that the Dead Sea Scrolls have been translated to abc,
it's more versatile than I thought ;) But all kidding aside, the ultimate value
of tunes as a resource is to be found when you've got a sizeable quantity of
them freely available for expert users (and here, by the way, I refer to
expert users of the _tunes_, not expert users of software or computers)
to index, compare, listen, comment on, and quickly contribute to the
growing quantity of source material. abc strikes a pretty good balance of
being machine parsable (in spite of some nasties like line-end treatments)
and human-writeable. Now if we could only embed a GIF into the abc,
life would be perfect (just mark up the paper and scan it in...!)
wil
John Chambers wrote:
> Laura writes:
> | >>>>> "Frank" == Frank Nordberg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> | Frank> Wil Macaulay wrote:
> | >> Lets have a little reality check here, and ask ourselves a
> | >> couple of simple questions: Why are there almost twenty
> | >> thousand tunes freely available in abc format on the internet,
> | >> more than two orders of magnitude more than any other format?
> |
> | Frank> You're underestimating both ABC and "other formats" here.
> | Frank> Musica Viva alone has 2192 tunes in GIF format - 313 of
> | Frank> them are also in PDF format and 1239 of them in ABC format.
> |
> | I think Wil was talking about formats in which music *information* is
> | available, not formats which graphically display information. All the
> | stuff in GIF or PDF on Musica Viva comes from music information which
> | has been entered in some other format, such as ABC or finale.
>
> This is correct, and quite relevant. GIF and JPEG aren't musical
> formats, and no musical information can be extracted from them. There
> are a lot of images of printed music on the web in such formats, but
> there's nothing you can do with them except download them and print
> them. Some of them came from scanners, and some via conversion from
> true musical files. In a couple cases, people have scanned in music
> so that others can transcribe it to abc. (This isn't unusual; it has
> been done with a lot of old documents, most notoriously with the Dead
> Sea Scrolls.)
>
> I've tried to find a way to locate images of music on the web, and
> it's pretty much hopeless. I've succeeded with abc because it's easy
> to extract musical information from abc files. I looked at the
> songwright and nottingham formats, which each have a few thousand
> tunes on the web, but most of them have been translated to abc, so I
> gave up on that. (A bit of a pity, I'd say, since it wouldn't hurt
> abc to have a bit of competition. But I understand why they did it.)
>
> I wonder how feasible it would be to add other formats to my abc
> search bot? I've glanced at lilypond and MusicXML, but not long
> enough to grok how I might write code to extract information such as
> titles, keys, etc. I looked into adding midi to my index, but a quick
> check showed that very few of the .midi files out there have a title,
> and that's what I use as a key.
>
> (Curiously, there are a couple of abc sites whose files lack titles.
> One is http://shiva.di.uminho.pt/~jj/musica/abc, which has a bunch of
> interesting-looking trad Portuguese tunes. My code doesn't index
> them, either.)
>
> BTW, the last run of my search program, a few days ago, gave the
> bottom-line numbers:
>
> Tunes Titles Files
> 80209 89310 25135
>
> The are counts of the X: and T: lines, and the distinct URLs. I've
> been lax about posting such numbers lately, and I should add the
> usual disclaimer that they mean less than you might think. There are
> around 25,000 distinct titles, with a mean of betweeen 3 and 4
> occurrences of each. But even this is suspect, because of spelling
> variations. Some of the replication is from different versions of
> tunes, but most is because of mirroring.
>
> Still, I'd estimate that there are maybe 20K truly distinct ABC tunes
> on the web that my search program has found, on about 125 machines.
>
> I've found a couple dozen new sites in the past month or so. Most of
> them are small, but there was one site with over 6000 tunes (mostly
> copied from other sites, so this site qualifies as a "mirror" site,
> and contributed very few new titles.) I'd bet that there are a lot of
> other small ABC sites out there, and there's a small chance of
> another big one. If you know of any obscure small abc sites, you
> might go to my finder:
> http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/music/abc/findtune.html
> Type in the host name, and it'll give you a list of all the known
> tunes on that host. If it's not found, send me the URL.
>
> Is this feasible with any other musical formats?
>
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--
Wil Macaulay email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
voice: +1-(905)-886-7818 xt2253 FAX: +1-(905)-886-7824
Syndesis Ltd. 28 Fulton Way Richmond Hill, Ont Canada L4B 1J5
"... pay no attention to the man behind the curtain ..."
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