--------
Jack Campin writes:
| Now I discover via JC's tune finder a file of uniformly good-quality
| transcriptions called longlist.txt with all those tunes in it, like this:
|
| > X:334
| > T:The Whim
| > S:John Clarkson Jr., American Tunes no 1, arr. for the Piano Forte c. 1805
| > N:Edinburgh Printed and Sold by J. Clarkson
| > N:to be had at his House No. 63 South Bridge
| > B:NLS MH.e.41
| > Z:Jack Campin , Sep 2000
| > Z: posted by Andrew Kuntz 2/01
| [body omitted here]
This is obviously someone's archive of tunes posted to some mailing
list. Such things are pretty common (though it's unusual for them to
be of good quality ;-). My search bot knows of a few such list
archives, and tries to index them, though it's not as successful as
I'd like. A lot of mailing lists have serious barriers to prevent
such indexing. This does sorta defeat the purpose of an archive, but
I guess a site's owner can implement whatever barriers they like.
Note also another curious detail: Whoever took the file from the list
added the second Z line, which gives the month and day but not the
year. That's really useful, huh? In any case, Andrew was probably
(though not necessarily) the one who posted it to the list, but
probably not the one who extracted it from the list and added it to
the archive. And the stripping away of a second part could have been
done at any stage of the process.
In any case, this isn't very good editing. We really should be doing
a lot more pushing for proper attribution of such things. This isn't
an easy job though. Just try finding all the mailing-list archives
that might contain abc tunes ...
| All of them had been edited to cut the bass out, exactly as I asked
| people NOT to do (the full versions were NOT included). Andrew never
| contacted me about this before doing it. And there is a significant
| change in one line of the header. My original had:
|
| > Z:Jack Campin <www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/>, Sep 2000
It's indeed annoying when people strip out attribution. One reason
this might be done is that a lot of people object to having their
email address or URL included in others' files. I've gotten a few
requests to remove email addresses and/or URLs from some of my online
tunes, which I've generally done, though I don't like it. The
explanation is usually that people don't want it there for spammers
to find. This is understandable, of course, but probably not
important. My site does return .abc files as MIME type text/vnd.abc,
as the MIME standard says, and most address harvesters ignore such
"unknown" types.
I did experiment some time back with having my Tune Finder add a line
giving the URL that a tune came from. I've commented this out,
because I found that it was just too difficult to get the line
terminators right for Mac and PC users. A lot of software on those
systems chokes if you don't use their (non-standard) line
terminators, and there's no way to find out what they want. Not
having access to all their software, I can't do much experimenting to
test whether my code is producing something that is usable. Maybe I
should just convert everything to ANSI standard terminators? I know -
I'll have it use RS (Record Separator) characters, which is what the
standard says is the preferred terminator.
;-)
To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
