ABC Tune Finder

JC's ABC Tune Finder
--- Experimental ---
This version may not work as well as you might like. If this worries you, try the regular version of the page.

title music codes contour
M: L: K: V:
Width: min thin wide max
Scale:> Limit: Threshold: Sel:

There are several types of matches done now:

title	Type a tune title, fragment of a title, or a perl5 pattern
music	Type the first few bars of music in ABC
codes	Type the numeric Gore/Breathnach first-difference code
contour	Type a string of the letters "usd" for up, same, down

Case is ignored.
Verbosity controls the width of the output page, but doesn't affect the information content.
In music/code matches, omit any pickup notes before the first bar.
Ornaments, grace notes, chords and such will be ignored, so don't bother.
Bar lines aren't really necessary, but don't hurt.
The M:, L: ind K: lanes aren't used right now.
The match routine currently reqires ABC that is fairly close to what is in the file. I'm working on ideas for making approximate matches work better. Got any ideas?

Press the find button to find the matching entries in JC's ABC index files. Matching is done without regard to case, and a partial title will match all titles that contain that phrase. It might be useful to know that lines in the index file are of the form:

TUNETITLE

URL

Key

Tune Title

where:

TUNETITLE is the "canonicalized" title, capitalized and all non-letters removed.

URL is the link to the file that contains the tune.

X is the index number from the tune's X: line.

Key is the contents of the tune's K: line.

Tune Title is the contents of the T: line, converted to HTML.

You can match on any of these fields. In particular, if you type part of the URL, you can select tunes at specific sites.

Here are the places where this Tune Finder is installed:

trillian.mit.edu

jc.tzo.net

For those not familiar with perl patterns, aka "regular expressions", here is a brief synopsis.

It's possible to use my conversion routines remotely to convert any ABC file on the Web to PostScript, GIF or MIDI. Here's how.

You can learn about the ABC music notation at Chris Walshaw's ABC home page. Chris has lots of pointers to other online music collections, and a list of software sources.