Jack Campin writes: | | 2. Make sure you aren't replicating something that's already been | replicated, perhaps with mistakes or computer garblement en route. | We don't need 105 identical versions of "The Irish Washerwoman" | hiding one original take on the tune. (An easy way for file | providers to do this is to add an "S:" line giving the original | URL if the tune is a literal copy of one from another site).
Good idea. But figuring out how to do this right isn't easy. It's all too easy for a chunk of software to decide on the worst one. Having a human do it for 100,000 tunes would be a bit of an undertaking. I'd doubt the sanity of anyone who volunteered for the job. It's worth discussing. But you're going up against the impressive sloppiness of much of the abc transcription on the Web, and the attitude that if it works with my abc tool, it's fine. I'm constantly disappointed by the lack of attribution in much of the online abc. | 3. Provide a human contact for every file (you'll have this anyway | if you've asked permission) - lots of ABC files raise questions, | and the TuneFinder interface provides no way of getting answers | to them, as what you get doesn't even have a URL included. | Also, as you're going to be writing a hell of a lot of "I am not | responsible for that content" messages to people who fire queries | at you, it would seem to be simple self-preservation to be able | to name somebody who *is* responsible for it. My tune finder in fact does insert the URL and date if you ask for a tune in TXT or ABC form. It uses the F: header line. A discussion some time back seems to have settled on this as the best choice. This line is included in the various conversions to other formats, but it does tend to be invisible in the final output. But anyone who uses the tune finder to get the raw abc will get this line. Doing this turned out to be tricker than one might expect. The problem was the variety of line terminators. Just inserting the F: line with an ANSI standard line terminator doesn't work, because a lot of software can't handle files with mixed styles of line terminators. I eventually found by experiment and a bit of email with people who had problems that the solution was to strip out the terminators and make them all the same. It doesn't matter whether you use \n or \r\n as long as they're all the same. Web software has to be able to handle both. I used just \n because it's both smaller and standard. (Silly reasons, I know, but it seems to work.) This URL doesn't directly give you an email address. In most cases, you can find one by stripping off fields from the URL and looking through the resulting pages for an <a href="mailto:...";> tag. But this isn't 100% guaranteed to work. There's no general solution to this that I know of. If a site's owner wants to remain incommunicado, it's fairly easy to do. This URL also just tells you where the tune finder found the tune. It doesn't tell you where the tune really came from. I know that some sites are mirrors of others, but they almost never tell you this. And writing software to figure it out is a daunting task. Lots of hours of fun programming for some web hacker. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
