What is this ?
This is a site full of musical notation; it holds a collection of material that is available as images of the "standard" 5-line staff notation, as MIDI, and in the source format (ABC) that it uses for input and editing. There are no recordings. This material has all been contributed, and can be added to, by anybody that cares to take the trouble to do so.
Most of the material here is publicly available for browsing by all comers, but adding new tunes and editing your existing ones requires a login - this is to ensure that each tune 'belongs' to a specific person and no-one else can change it. There is also a large and confusing range of configurable settings for obscure features, which you can store.
Being a new-ish site, the bulk of the material on it so far has been supplied by myself and reflects my interests. But of course, being open to anybody to contribute, it should start reflecting other peoples' interests as well as my own. I hope it will, and can't see any reason why that would be a problem - if people interested in other sorts of music find it convenient for what they're dealing with, go ahead & use it. The more the merrier.
Navigation
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There are 2 entry points to view the musical material. Both of these will generate lists of tunes, with links to view them.
- The Tune Lists page is currently organised in terms of the people who have contributed material, and offers an overview of all the available stuff.
- The Tune Search page will build lists of tunes according to your own choice of criteria.
- You can
- Write access :-
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There is an editing facility. You won't be able to save anything unless you're logged in, but you can use it
anyway, to play around with ABC, type up a tune and turn it into 'the dots', hear it as MIDI, transpose it, etc,
without having to install any software on your own machine. There are two versions of this.
- The simple editor form is just a straightfoward text entry box, where you can type according to the rules of ABC (which need a link), or paste whole tunes in from elsewhere.
- The fancy editor form attempts to make things easier, by providing separate entry fields with sensible labels and pointyclicky listboxes and things for the header values. You still have to know ABC for the actual musical content though.
- Tunes can also by submitted in bulk via a file-upload.
- However you submit material, it would probably be a good idea to read the Guidelines for Submissions page first.
- It is necessary to respect copyrights, where they exist. Music that is covered by copyright must not be made public here unless you have the permission of the copyright holder to do so. That's what the idea means, and breaching it risks bringing lawyers down on your head. You are allowed to keep tunes private. Such tunes will not be seen by anybody except yourself - use this when you don't have the copyright-holder's permission to publish something.
-
There is an editing facility. You won't be able to save anything unless you're logged in, but you can use it
anyway, to play around with ABC, type up a tune and turn it into 'the dots', hear it as MIDI, transpose it, etc,
without having to install any software on your own machine. There are two versions of this.
- If you want further explanations, details, etc, there is some documentation available.