> Well, after keeping it secret for ages (copyright, you know), I might as
> well hit you with this one:
> http://home.wanadoo.nl/atte/songbook
> Any comments welcome, esp if anyone has an idea on how to legalize the
> site.
Looks like good stuff from what I've been able to make of it so far.
Problems:
(1) you've used immensely long filenames, so tar on the Mac can't
extract all of them. I ended up hand-editing the tar lines and
the null characters out of the archive to turn it into a single
ABC file containing all the tunes. I suspect Windows users would
hit similar difficulties.
(2) there are some non-ASCII characters used in the chords - F8 and B0.
What do these represent?
(3) there are quite a few abcm2ps-isms which need to be edited out to
get BarFly to handle the file: the multivoice syntax (no way round
that, I guess) and the !fine! exclamation-point abuse (bleurgh, no
excuse there, dump it). I assume Muse would need something similar
to BarFly. Most of the material doesn't really need to have the
chords separated into a different voice, and many more programs
could handle your tunes if you provided a zipped-together version.
(4) there are no tempi. I've been trying to play "Ask me now" on the
alto recorder (interesting piece, gets the fingers doing new things)
but it's not on the only Monk record I've got and I can imagine it
going equally well at almost any speed. What's the right one?
(5) what on earth is going on in "Five"? Are the chords in 4/4 with
the melody in 5/4? If so there are much easier ways to write it.
Legalization: I can't see any way round telling the publishers of each
piece what you're up to and asking *them* what they want to happen. And
I'm not sure that can be done without sending some of them off on a trawl
across the entire Web looking for ABC files that might be convertible
into invoices. At some point that's going to happen anyway but we better
be prepared for it.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jack Campin * 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU, Scotland
tel 0131 660 4760 * fax 0870 055 4975 * http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/
food intolerance data & recipes, freeware Mac logic fonts, and Scottish music
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