[ putting the collection name in the title field of a zero-numbered tune at the start of a file ]
>> This might be worth doing for other instances where people have encoded >> entire collections - if the first entry is of the form >> X:0 >> T:Skye Collection [...] >> if somebody enters "Skye Collection" as a search string [downloading >> the entire file] is most likelyto be what they want to happen. > noplisnot! If there is a need of searching the tunefinder for the source > or book a tune is taken from it would be reasonable to ask for the S: > and the B: fields to be included in the tunefinder. Sure, and it would be nice to be able to search on any of the header fields too, but meanwhile this is a way of working with what we've got. This way of doing it also makes it easier to update existing ABC files; there are some out there where the collection information is only given in non-ABC text at the beginning, and it's easier to simply add a dummy tune header there than go through the whole file putting S: and B: lines into each tune. > Please do not change the way of writing a abc header to bend it to the > needs of an peripheral application. I'm not suggesting we change anything - this is a convention using the existing spec. The worst case is that we end up with a few incomplete tunes; what would that break? - tunes without bodies are out there already (not just on my site). In the specific case of Atalanta Fugiens I haven't done *anything* nonstandard here - the extra T: line is something like T:Atalanta Fugiens (cantus firmus) a legitimate title which exactly describes the tune in the body that follows. > The abc format gives advice where to store such info. It will not make > things better to establish some primitive dialectinstead. > B:book yes yes archive B:O'Neills > S:source yes S:collected in Brittany > Maybe it would be a reasonable effort to give some detail information > for these fields in the comentary section of the standard. It might also be a bit too late, as the ambiguity has already taken you and I in different directions in the way we use these (and other people have still different interpretations). > To me B: is the print from which I transcribed and/or a book in which > this tune can be found in a similar version (I use "B:from:" to > indicate the first and "B:also in:" for the second). > S:is the source in the scientific meaning - the manuscript or even the > person who carried the tradition. I often transcribe things from rare printed sources. So for me it's important to have a way of identifying the specific copy; often there may only be one copy in the world with a particular tune in it, because of an undocumented variant print run or hand-written annotation. So I've ended up with a convention where S: identifies the book generically (title, edition) and B: gives the details needed to identify the exact bit of paper I was looking at, e.g. a library catalogue number. I don't expect everybody to make this distinction, usually it doesn't matter. There's another situation (already out there on the web) where getting a bunch of related tunes together matters but where they don't all come from the same book: when you want a set of tunes for a specific country dance. If you type "Hamilton House" into a search engine you might want the tune of that name, but you might also want an entire set for the corresponding dance. There is no unique source for such sets; different bands have different ones. There's no standard ABC field to put in the header saying which dance the tune is for, and even if there were it wouldn't help much, because some sequences of tunes work and others don't, you can't just put any tunes associated with the dance together in any order and expect to get a playable result. > by the way I do not know about te exact use of the "F:" field, can > someone show me. Maybe this would be a better place to store the > information in question. Nobody seems to be using it; whatever usage gets agreed on, it'll be years before there are enough files containing it for it to be worthwhile for the Tune Finder to search on it. =================== <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> =================== To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
