Laurie writes: | JC's tune finder is magic. | | For instance I was at the last M27 Megabop which Rufus Returns played at. | They played one number I really liked but I was unable to learn it there and | then (no Mozart, I). I went to Chipenham Folk Festival last weekend and | someone played it in the English Session in the Rose and Crown barn. I | asked what it was called (The Dark Girl Dressed in Blue) and I now have | about 10 different versions of it. Magic.
Hmmm .... I should object to this. It's not magic. There's a bunch of code behind it, and it's all "Open Source", so you can read it and figure out exactly what it's doing. The search bot and the scripts behind the lookup are all in perl, and are available if you're interested. Perl itself is completely Open Source, and all the code for it (in C) is available, so there's no magic there. The C compiler on my machine is in fact gcc, which is also Open Source, so if you have questions about some of the more subtle things in perl, you can examine the way it's compiled. The hardware it's running on is an Intel Pentium, and the specs for that are all published. Of course, all this might take you a while. But there's no magic at all. Just a lot of work by a lot of people, all of whom have provided all the source for your understanding. ;-) (And much of the credit goes to the people who have transcribed all that music into abc and put it on their web sites, about 240 of them now. Without that, my site wouldn't have anything to search.) To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
