Archive for June, 2009

Urban myths

Monday, June 29th, 2009

Popped over to mudcat yesterday to announce the new website.

Within a few hours there was a reply from Joe Offer saying that he didn’t realise I had invented abc, and then a reply to that saying:

Chris Walshaw invented abc when he was on holiday in France, encountered some French musicians with interesting tunes, and lacked manuscript paper to write them down. So he just wrote the names of the notes along with a multiplier for the length as necessary, and a bit of header information required to read the rest. Later, faced with a pile of scraps of paper with tunes written in text he wrote the first version of abc2mtex as a way of converting this material to conventional musical notation.

At first I thought  – no, that’s nonsense, I was in Bath at the time (no, not the bath a la Archimedes, but Bath the Georgian city where I was a student) and wrote the tunes out in a fledgling abc notation to take abroad with me.

(Admittedly, a few years later I did collect a load of tunes in France, but I did it with a tape recorder like anyone else … and then transcribed them into abc.)

So then I checked the history page, which has been on the abc site for ages.

And guess what …  it could easily be misinterpreted to tell the new version (obviously the page isn’t as clear as I thought).

And actually … I rather like the new version.

So … believe which version you prefer. That’s what urban myths are for.

Chris

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LOTRO

Sunday, June 28th, 2009

Well, I kind of expected I might get to hear about new abc collections and software by relaunching the site, but I hadn’t anticipated LOTRO.

Apparently,  LOTRO (Lord of the Rings Online) is a multiplayer online role-playing game that has adopted abc notation for music making by the players.

I was alerted to it by one of the first replies to my poll on people’s favourite abc software.

And it turns out that there are thousands of abc tunes compiled by LOTRO players – including pop and rock classics (from Abba to ZZ Top) and classical pieces from Bach, Beethoven and others.

Some of them are quantized midi files (i.e. probably played in on a midi keyboard and then converted to abc) which means they don’t always have bar lines. Also, if the quantizing hasn’t worked perfectly, you get some very odd note lengths (I saw one abc note with the length 45/8!).

Nonetheless, it’s a fascinating (and welcome) development for abc notation and one which I would never have guessed at.

Now, where did I put my lute …

Chris

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Site now launched

Friday, June 26th, 2009

Well, it was a hard slog, but I finally got the new site launched.

I’ve been working on the tune search on and off since last October and putting in most of my spare time since April. By early June I thought it was nearly ready and bought the domain name and a year’s hosting as a birthday present to myself. DailyRazor.com are my host company – and very responsive they are too. Highly recommended (especially if you want java servlet hosting)!

Of course, setting everything up wasn’t as straightforward as I’d imagined, though it was gratifying to see it working in just a couple of days. And then to spot repeated accesses by a IP address I tracked down as a Googlebot – they’d found me already (though since the site has Google ads, I guess that’s not surprising).

The site crashed soon after that – the server was at the limit of its memory and ran out. And that was with just me and Google using the site – it didn’t bode well for lots of users.

However, I managed to optimise the memory use (cut it by about a quarter) and so far, so good.

There were still loads of little jobs to do though and I wasn’t at all sure it would be ready for my intended launch date of 21st June – midsummer’s day.

And then, in one of those happy synchronicities, just five days short I got an email from Julian May of the BBC (I knew him when I played in Jean-Pierre Rasle’s show, Cornemusiques, on Radio 3). Anyway Julian said he was making a programme for Radio 4 about abc and the Village Music Project and could he and Tim Van Eyken come and interview me.

They arranged to visit on 23rd and so then I just had to get it done.

A few more days frantic work and it was ready, up and running, just waiting for me to tell an unsuspecting world about it. I launched it, sitting in bed with my laptop, replacing pages on the old website with redirects, changing the forwarding for abcnotation.org.uk and finally emailing the abcusers mailing list.

Julian and Tim turned up at the University two days later and it was gratifying to see that not only was the site still up, but the clustrmap already showed several hundred visits from around the world. In fact one of the things that impressed them most was the clustrmap from the old site showing visitors from pretty much every country on earth and including a big red dot on Timbuktu.

Anyway the interview went pretty well, I think, and the programme’s due to go out next month (BBC Radio 4 at 1.30pm on 21st July). I even got to play my pipes for them.

All in all then a bit of a roller-coaster ride in the last couple of months. And there still seems so much to do …

Chris

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