Nothing particularly onerous; a couple of things that are so obvious they hardly even need saying, and then a couple of things you might not have thought of ... Material contributed here needs to :-

  1. be some sort of music
  2. respect any copyrights involved, if you make it publicly visible
  3. co-exist with the other material here

This is a musical site

I built this for the purpose of managing a large collection of small 'traditional' tunes, and it's likely that it would be most convenient for dealing with such, or similar, material. But if people dealing with other styles of music find that it suits their purposes too, I'd see this as an unexpected bonus rather than as a problem. Use it, do with it whatever you can make it do. Just so long as it's music, it's welcome.

Please re-read the notice on the front page concerning Copyright. It's important.

Co-existence

The details behind this are of most interest to users who prefer to deal with their tunes in 'raw ABC', and most of all to those who want to upload existing files of tunes in that format for storage here, but the general point should be taken note of by everybody who stores music here, however they work with it - which is, that this is a database; and a database is a very fine and powerful thing, provided that the data it's given means what it's expected to. Please try and be careful to put the things you know about a tune into sensible places. When in doubt, look at how the other stuff here does it, and do it like that.

For example :- if everybody who knows which country a tune comes from stores this information in the field labelled "Country" (the ABC O: field), then people can go to the Search page and look at the contents of the listbox labelled 'Country', see a list of countries that tunes are known to come from, indicate the ones they're interested in, and go to a list of those. If somebody decides they'd prefer to store this information in a field with a different name, then people won't see it in the list of countries and that tune won't be findable in that way. And whichever other field they use for it will get clogged up with information that possibly doesn't belong there, so that list will be less easy to deal with.

The need to make this point becomes clearer and less trivial if you consider the possibility of uploading tunes written in ABC, and the existence of the raw ABC editor, where the important fields are referred to in the traditional cryptic ABC style, instead of by the labels this site uses, which attempt to spell out their intended uses in a clear way (this is one of the main reasons why I took the trouble to provide them). The help pages include a full list of the fields available, showing the conventions the site applies for each of the underlying ABC fields. If you have opinions about any of these, I'll be happy to discuss the matter. Please appreciate that for a site like this, holding material from a number of different contributors, it's important that we all do things the same way. If people make a practice of disregarding this necessity, it will make the site a lot less useful than it otherwise could be. Having put a lot of work into building it, I'm bound to view this as undesirable - in extreme cases, I reserve the right to take whatever action seems necessary in this regard; either to ameliorate a nuisance for other users or to prevent its commission.