Re: [scots-l] Jack's ABCs (was: Few Notes)
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. I'm not trying to prevent them from extracting what they want from the file so long as they READ IT FIRST. When a file contains stuff like corrupt copies of tunes from manuscripts where the only indication there's anything wrong is the explanatory text, you are NOT doing anybody any favours by letting them fish the tune out randomly by name with software that withholds the context to explain what they've got. 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 ... For most of the files on my site it doesn't matter in the least if they're randomly extracted. For others it matters so much that I won't have the file on the site or available to the public at all if that can be done. The decision needs to be made on a per-file basis, not per-site. For virtually every other category of information available on the Web (mp3 files, medical journal papers, porno image collections, conference boards, documentation sites with disclaimers you have to agree to...), being listed in an index doesn't have to confer automatic unconditional access to the content. Why should ABC be uniquely inflexible? (The most determined agree to this first and no use other than as specified clause I've ever seen is the one at the start of http://www.esotericarchives.com/juratus/juratus.htm - and no, he isn't making it up, that condition is in the original source). A level of control that would be reasonably futureproof would be to also allow a concise way of marking individual tunes within files as not downloadable in isolation. I don't need that, but maybe somebody else might (e.g. if the file is just one part in a band arrangement - someone who gets the second trombone part from a brass band setting of Arkansas Traveller when they just want the tune is not going to be a happy customer, while if they got the cornet part they'd probably have what they want). === http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/ === Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [scots-l] Jack's ABCs (was: Few Notes)
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. (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). 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. 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. === http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/ === Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [scots-l] Jack's ABCs (was: Few Notes)
Nigel Gatherer wrote: | Jack Campin wrote: | - can you handle a 200-tune file with all the tunes numbered zero? |This is to stop John Chambers' Tune Finder plagiarizing my stuff |by ripping things out of context (which he already has done with |the current version despite my explicit request both in the file |and on this list for him to desist)... | | What did he say? John is, on the strength of his usenet/mailing list | contributions, a decent, fair-minded chap with enough know-how and | ingenuity to create his tune-finding software. I'd bet that with his | considerable abilities he'd be able simply to devise a way of | preserving your material so that it isn't accessible. Hmmm ... I'd thought I did what Jack asked. 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. So I'm curious about how I done any ripping, on or off. I'd like to know how my tune finder can be used to extract just one of the tunes from Jack's X:0 files. I don't know how to do it myself. In any case, my search bot has a config file in which I can tell it to ignore a host or a URL (and anything it points to). If anyone wants only part of their abc collection indexed and made available through my tune finder, I can exclude single files or whole directories. (That paragraph was why I decided to post this rather than just sending a note to Jack. I'd like to invite people to tell me if they'd like some of their tunes excluded from my tune finder's indexes. Remember that it can only be done on a per-URL basis. One file or one directory and its subdirectories, or the equivalent with trees of web pages.) One thing I can't do, of course, is prevent someone else from using my links to download a file and chop it up. Nobody can prevent this on someone else's machine. Most abc tools that I know of have the ability to separate out parts of abc files (single tunes, single voices, just melody without chords, whatever). This is natural; music tools that can't do such chopping wouldn't be very useful. The only way I know to effectively prevent this is to not put a file on the web. Also, the main (one might say only) purpose of my tune finder is to locate specific tunes and download them. If you don't want people to do this, maybe it's best if I don't index your files at all. A few people have requested this, and I've put them in my avoid list. They can still potentially be found through the big search sites, but such sites aren't too good at specialized things like abc. | The first thing you've got to do is speak with each other. Tell him | what you want to happen and what you don't want to happen. If you feel | you've already done that, persevere: perhaps there has been a | misunderstanding. Yeah; I thought I understood what Jack wanted, and supplied it. I was obviously wrong. Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
[scots-l] Jack's ABCs (was: Few Notes)
Jack Campin wrote: ...my modes tutorial... - can you handle a 200-tune file with all the tunes numbered zero? This is to stop John Chambers' Tune Finder plagiarizing my stuff by ripping things out of context (which he already has done with the current version despite my explicit request both in the file and on this list for him to desist)... What did he say? John is, on the strength of his usenet/mailing list contributions, a decent, fair-minded chap with enough know-how and ingenuity to create his tune-finding software. I'd bet that with his considerable abilities he'd be able simply to devise a way of preserving your material so that it isn't accessible. The first thing you've got to do is speak with each other. Tell him what you want to happen and what you don't want to happen. If you feel you've already done that, persevere: perhaps there has been a misunderstanding. -- Nigel Gatherer, Crieff, Scotland [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.argonet.co.uk/users/gatherer/ Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
