• There are several types of matches:

  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 "ud" for up, down.

• Case is always ignored.
• Width controls the wordiness of the output page.
• Limit is the maximum number of matches returned.
• 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: and K: values probably 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?
• Send comments, bug reports, and other suggestions to John Chambers at MIT.

This is a tool for looking up titles in my online index of ABC tunes on the Web. Fill in the form at the top, and 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 ... X Key ... Tune Title

• 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.

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.