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Jack Campin writes:
| The other problem is that most of the duff ABC out there either has
| no traceable author or else is in collections so enormous that it
| can't be fixed without a great deal of work - in the latter case the
| author almost certainly knows what needs to be done. In some cases
| the author simply can't do the requisite debugging because they only
| have access to some idiosyncratic ABC implementation.
In most cases that I've seen, the author (or transcriber) isn't the
right one to fix the problem. Typically, person A emails a batch of
tunes to person B, who puts them up on a web site. The damage was
done in transit, and B didn't notice.
The problem can't be fixed by A, because A's files aren't damaged.
You need to tell B about it. Typically, B will then send A a message
saying "Send me those tunes again, but this time tell your mailer not
to do line wrapping, or set the line length to 1000 characters." This
fixes the problem. But it can take a while.
Another partial solution is exemplified by the set of Playford tunes
on the Ceolas site. These have been line-wrapped, and they haven't
been fixed in several years. So I grabbed the whole set and put them
on my own site, with the problems fixed. As I've used them, I've also
edited my copies, typically by adding chords, so my copies are no
longer just undamaged copies of theirs..
But this is only partial, because someone who uses my Tune Finder has
a 50% chance of asking for the Ceolas versions rather than mine, and
they then get the line-wrapped version.
Sure wish I could reach out and fix the Ceolas files. Since I can't,
I've worked on fixing them after the fact, by adding a kludge to my
Tune Finder's extraction code to try to undo the damage. It's only
partly successful, but it helps. It's actually not very successful
yet with the Ceolas Playford tunes. For an example, ask the Tune
Finder for MERRYMERRYMILKEMAIDS, and then ask for the first match in
PS, GIF or PNG format. The first staff seems to have been line
wrapped twice, with "interesting" results.
(Hmmm ... Maybe I'd better grab another copy of this, in case someone
there sees this message and decides to fix the problem. ;-)
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