When you are logged in, the lists show the titles of the tunes belonging to you as links, which bring you to a page with the contents of that tune displayed in a form so that you can modify it.

This page has two possible formats. You can toggle between the two layouts with one of the buttons in the group at the bottom of the page, labelled either "Edit as single block of ABC" or "Edit header fields separately", depending on which you're seeing already.

the raw ABC form

The first of these is a simple edit-box where you can type a complete tune, in raw ABC format, much like any other text editor (only cruder). People who aren't that familiar with ABC may find this handy to copy-and-paste a tune into. People who are familiar with ABC may just want to see what they're doing without any fancy stuff getting in the way; the normal rules of ABC apply. I don't think there's very much that needs saying about this,

the easy form

The other form is a fancier layout which attempts to make things more convenient. The various fields are displayed in separate 'controls', either editable free-form text or a listbox of selectable values. The layout of this thing is very configurable, via the Configure display page - I recommend using listboxes for all the fields that make sense that way - a mouse-click is often easier than typing, and it saves the risk of speeling misstakes. Also, I hope to encourage people to use existing values wherever possible instead of coming up with their own variants, because it simplifies the search space, and helps make tunes easier to find. If you want to reconfigure the page half-way through editing a tune, remember to save your work first, it won't be there when you return (though the browser's 'back' button may help).

In addition to these fields there are 2 more boxes.

The first of these is a widget labelled 'New Value(s) and Key(s)'. This is how you enter values for fields for which there isn't a field control already present, if you don't want to reconfigure the form to always display one, and also how you can add new values into the 'listbox' fields, when you want one that isn't already there to be clicked on. It has a listbox on the left, naming all the fields in use, and an area where you can type text in. If you select one of the fields from the listbox, the values you type are taken as values for that selected field, and typing several lines will set multiple values for that field. Alternatively, if you don't select any fields, then you can type lines in the normal ABC header Key:value style, possibly setting values for more than one field. The 'Accept this' button is just a convenience, to pick up these values and display them in the normal style of the editor. You don't need to do this, they'll also be picked up when you push any other button.

The second of these is labelled 'ABC tune body', and that's what it's for - the text representing "the dots" for that tune, according to the rules of ABC - everything that comes after the K: line that ends the header. Header lines entered into this box will be treated as 'inline' values, not part of the header proper. (It follows from this that you can't copy-and-paste a complete tune from an external source into here. Use the 'Edit as single block of ABC' button to get the raw-ABC editor, and do it there).

Most, but not all, of these fields will accept several values; a few are required, and the editor will not save the tune unless they're supplied. See the list of fields for details.

The Buttons

Should be mostly self-explanatory, I hope.

'Show image/Play midi from current values', and the 'download' options, work from the current values you've entered into the form, allowing you to check the state of your work. Some browsers may be configured to cache images in ways which interfere with this - if the image you see here doesn't reflect your changes, check this.

The tune data from this form gets a small amount of rudimentary error-checking, to catch some of the more-obviously wrong values (see validation). If it 'fails' this, you will come back to the editor form, with, hopefully, an explanatory message (displayed like this) explaining what it didn't like. If you want to put these problems aside for later, the 'postpone' button allows you to do this. This will move the tune out of the normal list into a separate list of tunes waiting to be attended to (this will also include any tunes from a file upload that were found to have problems). When any of your tunes are in this state of suspended animation, your 'Tunes' front page will tell you about it and include a link to bring up a list of these tunes so you can sort them out.

The public/private radio-buttons do what they say; you are allowed to keep a certain proportion (currently 50%) of your tunes private - tunes marked as private will not be included in the lists seen by other people. When you are logged in, if you have any private tunes the 'Configure display' page gives you the option of including those tunes in the list or excluding them from it.

See Also