John Chambers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I've seen a few discussions of how slow the RSCDS has been to take > advantage of the Net. My usual comment has been something like: Of > course they're a bunch of conservative fuddy-duddies who are decades > behind the times. The RSCDS exists to preserve a tradition. It's > their role to be conservative fuddy-duddies who are decades behind > the times. It's up to us radical revisionists to develop their online > system, and when they're good and ready, we can give them a copy of > what we've done. (When this happens, I expect they'll just invite 2 > or 3 of us to do the work.
There are moves afoot to do exactly that. Chances are that when this happens the RSCDS folks (who aren't all »fuddy-duddies« at all -- since the big changing of the guard a few years back they're really nice folks once you get to know them) won't quite know what hit them :^) > What I'd be tempted to do is set up a SCD > wiki and invite all the strathspey subscribers to contribute.) The fun thing is that this already exists. It's not been advertised a lot but I have one on the www.strathspey.org site -- it's now being used for the »frequently asked questions« that I don't have time to really work on (or so it seems). If there are other worthwhile uses for it then great. > Yes; he already links to the Fiddler's Companion site. Maybe we > should both be discussing with him the easiest way to interconnect > all of our sites. I have sets for about 600 dances in my collection > (a bare start ;-). I've developed an approach that works for me. But > it might be time to start talking about linking the SCD web sites. Alan isn't really concerned about the web aspect of DanceData so far; the web front-end is really my baby. I would like to see the music aspect of DanceData souped up; Alan isn't a musician himself and I know he wouldn't mind some help in that direction. I suppose what would be nice would be an extension of the database (or at least the web front-end) to cover non-recorded sets of tunes -- so far, the database deals in suggested tunes for dances and in recordings of sets of tunes. The easiest way to do this within the existing framework might be to come up with a »super-album« (or albums) of non-recorded sets and to pretend that they're all tracks on that. On the other hand, we're really dealing with sheet music here, so the proper way to do this is by allowing tunes in the database to have sheet music (a.k.a. ABC) associated with them and then assembling sets out of the individual ABC entries, tune-finder style. We should probably take this off the ABC list since it won't be interesting to most subscribers. > I get the impression that a lot of teachers have put their favorite > dances into their computers, and some are online. But they all do it > differently. I wonder how long it will take for this to get into a > form that can actually be used? I've collected a few myself, but my > dance descriptions are in N different formats. Having standardized notations for cribs, dance descriptions etc. is one of the yearly discussion topics on Strathspey that never seem to get anywhere. > I thought it was one in my collection, so I > whipped out my cute Kyocera "smartphone" (which runs PalmOS and has > some ABC software installed), used the browser to find the dance on > my MIT site, and handed her the phone with the dance description on > the screen. I got lots of geek points for that one. Oh yes, gadgets. A colleague of mine is working on the (Linux-based) system software for one of those newfangled harddisk-based MP3 units. The difference is that that thing has a fairly big LCD screen (for video display). It has a 40GB disk, and thus could store several hundred CD's worth of MP3 dance tracks -- and it would be eminently possible to embed dance cribs or even Pilling-style graphics in the MP3 using special »tags«. I told him that if he adds variable speed control to the thing I'll buy one the first day it is out :^) We're stuck with recorded music for dance classes and I should greatly enjoy not having to haul all those CDs to class. Anselm -- Anselm Lingnau .......................................... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Trying to get Windows to run on the hardware that Linux typically runs on is like pushing an elephant through a keyhole. -- _Forbes_, November 1998 To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
