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| On another mailing list, John Chambers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
|
| > I wonder how many more musical mailing lists have tunes in archives?
|
| There must have been a few ABC notated tunes in the Scots-L archives.
| Would it be desirable/useful/easy/worthwhile to consider collecting
| them together?
Actually, I've been doing that since early in 2000. Counting the tune
you just posted, I have 49 tunes. They're at:
http://trillial.mit.edu/~jc/music/abc/mirror/scots-l/
I'd encourage others to do this, too, for any lists they're on. It
can take a bit of time to put the ABC tunes into a usable form. The
problem is that you tend to get tunes posted without a title, by
someone wondering what the tune is called. Then you get a bunch of
replies that give the title and maybe other information about the
tune, all in English. No software can ever extract this information.
So you hunt down the replies (which aren't always recognized as a
thread by mail readers due to mangling of the subject or message-id
lines), and you do a bunch of editing.
My Tune Finder does have a couple of mailing-list archives in its
list of places to search, but it is quite unsuccessful at extracting
ABC tunes from them, for the above reasons. It does a much better job
when someone has taken the time to combine the messages into one ABC
file with the info in the header lines.
This takes sufficient work that I find myself being lazy and missing
some of them. And I'm not sure I always find all the information that
people post. So I'd encourage others to do the same, and put the
tunes on their web site.
This could be a useful resource to future musical historians. For that
matter, it can be useful to people today.
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