Jack Campin comments: | > Well, for staff notation, my Tune Finder shouldn't have any probem. | > It will produce the the title, composer, etc, and no staff. [...] | > As for sound files, I use abc2midi, which produces a really short | > file if there's no tune body. That's about all it can do, I suppose. | > But it doesn't fail. | | These aren't the most helpful behaviours. The user is left guessing | as to why they got an empty staff or silent MIDI file. An explicit | notation to say the body was meant to be empty, passed onwards through | the pipeline, would reassure them that nothing had gone wrong and give | them a better idea of what to do next - i.e. read the ABC source. | | One place this information might be displayed is in the Tune Finder | index itself, in the field that lists the fields present in the tune.
You're right. In fact, I've had a number of email queries about apparent failures that were due to "tunes" that lacked any notes. Sometimes this was intentional, sometimes it was because the file was double spaced. It would be useful to have an indication of this. The problem is how best to say this. The Tune Finder's results are already getting rather wide, and don't work well on small devices such as handhelds. This could make the outputt even wider. There is a list of headers that could contain a code for "no notes". This field already uses a double quote to indicate that accompaniment chords are present. I wonder if there's a good single char that could stand for "notes", or maybe for "no notes"? Perhaps '*' (asterisk) could be used for this, as it doesn't seem to have any other use, and it is conventionally used to indicate an explanatory footnote. The program could actually include a footnote that looks like: * Headers only, no notes present This would be somewhat subtle, but could get across the idea that the "tune" has a problem. Anyone have a good suggestion of other compact ways to say "This tune contains no actual music"? To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
