>| 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 was mainly concerned with the case where they're literally identical -
the many occasions where a tune has been copied unchanged from one site
to another. That's a well and truly solved problem (it's what DNA-
matching software does). If one is worse than another they can't be
the same; I wasn't proposing any sort of control on *musical* quality,
or even syntactical correctness: simply trying to make things easier
for the user who has many copies to choose among.
>| 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.
> 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.
But not when you download an entire file (which is what I always do).
> 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.
The reason for this, at least with the Mac stuff I know about, is that
most conversion utilities look at the first line in the file and try
to guess what convention it's using from that. If the first line is
different from all the others this is maximally confusing for the poor
wee thing.
What do you do with a file in EBCDIC? - that makes these variations
look rather trivial. Somebody must have ported abc2ps to IBM MVS or
ICL VME, surely?
Somebody sometime ought to figure out what has usually gone wrong
with all those sites where (at least as viewed from a Mac) all the
ABC is double-spaced. I suspect somebody simply used the wrong flag
on an email or ftp client that does conversion on the fly, and that
the problem is quite easy to avoid no matter what OS and software
you've got.
> This URL doesn't directly give you an email address. [...] If a site's
> owner wants to remain incommunicado, it's fairly easy to do.
The Tune Finder can't do much about this, but a planned mirroring site
can. There is no obligation to mirror stuff from people who want to
make life difficult for their readers and who believe they're such
important celebrities that nobody should be informed who they really
are. In any case, if that's the way somebody thinks, they can make
their lawyer's office the contact. (An email address might not be the
right sort of contact, and whatever is provided - ICQ number, mobile
phone number, EBay seller id - its validity needs to be checked every
so often).
I wonder if we could do something like EBay ratings for tune providers?
A feedback message board, even? ("Henrik's Irish Washerwoman really
does wash whiter...")
The one concern I would have about having my own stuff mirrored is that
I'd want the mirror to encourage people to look at my own site too; to
a certain extent the ABC files I have available are advertising and I'd
like them to function that way. Other people might want the opposite -
Demon's server can handle all the hits anyone's likely to throw my way
and I've set things up for maximum simplicity, but somebody whose primary
server has a wet-piece-of-string connection or a mega-inconvenient user
interface might to want to offload the work onto Toby's machines.
=================== <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> ===================
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