Jack Campin writes: | > To my knowledge, my abc | > tune finder will not return single files from his files that have X:0 | > for the tunes. I even fixed a "bug" (which I'd thought a feature ;-) | > in which the ABC link returned only the tunes and not the surrounding | > text. For X:0 it now returns the entire file, exactly as the Get | > link, but with text/vnd.abc as the MIME type. | | The problem is what zero-numbering everything does to other software. | With BarFly, it makes relatively little difference, but it does lose | you one way of navigating round the file. Other software I don't know | about may have worse problems, which I why I was asking how it handles | this. Compatibility with the commonly available ABC players is more | important for this specific file than having it indexed anywhere.
But this has nothing to do with the accusation of plagiarism. I'd agree that numbering all the tunes X:0 limits what can be done with the file. On its face, zero is "just another number" and should be a valid index. But, of course, nobody numbers things that way. I wanted a way to make it possible to download all the abc in a file, and this seemed like the least disruptive kludge. It would have been possible to use a non-numeric index for that purpose, but that would break a lot of things. Even using a decimal point in a number breaks things, though it's not a violation of the abc "standard". | (The TuneFinder still pulls out individual tunes from the old version, | ignoring the explicit request in the text of the file not to do that). Aha! It's not misinterpreting the X:0 tunes; you still have a file with the original numbering. That's handled the same as any other abc file full of tunes. The only feasible way to prevent that is to not index it at all. My code doesn't understand English. I doubt if it ever will. But I can put a specific URL (file or directory) on the "avoid" list, if someone sends me the URL. Maybe that's the solution here. My search bot also honors robots.txt files, but there can be only one of them per site, so that's not a very fine-grained solution. And most people don't have write permission on their server's robots.txt file. | The preferable option would be for an X:0 line preceding any tune to | prevent downloading of individual tunes at any later point in the same | file. Your own dance sets are structured that way, with X:0 attached | to a pseudo-tune used as an identifier for the set, and I presume the | intention of those sets was that people would get all the tunes for a | single dance as a unit. Actually, that was half my intention. I make my SCD medleys with a dummy X:0 tune to put a dance title and other info at the top. This is then followed by the tunes, with the kludge of using the P: header lines to name the "parts" of the medley, i.e., the individual tunes. But I give these tunes positive indexes, so that users can download individual tunes if they like. I'd consider this reasonable, because it's likely that someone might want just the title/recommended tune, to which they will add their own favorite alternate tunes. This scheme both makes both dance and tune titles come out on the page in the conventional places, and lets people download the entire set or single tunes as they wish. This is what I want. | Some other directive at the start of the file would be okay, but not | something that has to be attached to each tune - with the tutorial | that would add 200 lines of repeated boilerplate, which is acceptable | when tunes are to be handled individually but not when the whole file | is primarily aimed at human readers who have to scroll through it. Several schemes are possible. But I'd prefer to back off a bit. If you put a file full of abc tunes on the web, presumably it's so that people can download it. Otherwise, there is no obvious motive to putting it on the web at all. And most users are going to feed it to one or more of the extant abc tools. All of them that I know of have the ability to cut out single tunes. For some of them, this is required for their function. For example, a player would be worthless if it produced all the tunes at once. To be useful, a play has to be able to play just one tune at a time. And you can stop it after one tune, so cutting out a single tune and presenting it to the user's ears is inherent to the task. Most of them also implement the usual CD-style features, such as random play, re-ordering the tunes, and looping on a single tune. So I'd think that trying to prevent people from chopping up an abc file is a futile goal. People will do this with hardly a thought, no matter what you say. The abc tools make it easy. And, in reality, extracting single tunes is the only thing that my tune finder does. So if you don't want that, maybe I oughta just not index your site at all. That's easy enough ... Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music & Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
