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contentsWhy doesn't tune X (or collection Y) appear in the tune search?There can be a number of reasons for exclusion including:
Why is there no pop / rock music in the tune search?It's nothing personal, but tunes in abc tend to be mostly from the folk or early music traditions (though you could try the LOTRO collections). Those in the tune search are also out of copyright (or permission has been granted to use them), which means that almost all of them are more than 70 years old. Can you include my tune collection (or someone else's) in the tune search?Yes. Just let me know. Can you exclude my tune collection / (copyright) tune from the tune search?Yes. Just let me know. What's all this about copyright?Please see the copyright page. The tune search is out of date and doesn't reflect the latest changes in my tune collection?Like google, the abc tune search doesn't show real-time search results. Instead the results reflect the state of tune collections the last time they were visited (indexed) by the abc search bot (kind of like the googlebot, but with much more restricted scope). Typically I run the abc search bot once a month, so nothing should be more than a month out of date (in contrast, the googlebots are running all the time but typically only visit each page once every 3 months or so - however, they do have a enormous job to do). Why does the search show lots of copies of the same tune?Probably it's just because folk music comes from an aural tradition and as a result there are often lots of different versions of the same tune. However, since the early days of abc, various people have compiled (and made available online) collections of tunes found elsewhere online, meaning that some tunes appear on multiple websites. Different search engines tend to handle this differently. John Chambers' tune finder tends to give you every copy of the tune that his abcbot has come across, whilst the Folk Tune Finder has sophisticated indexing algorithms to identify identical tunes. The abc tune search falls somewhere between these two camps and to reduce proliferation, files and collections that are obvious duplicates of others are excluded from the listings. However, the matching algorithm isn't that smart, so duplicates can still sometimes occur. Please let me know if you spot any major duplications. searchingCan I search inside a particular collection or file?Yes, using site searches (which you can now do from every tune page - just look for the "search this file" and "search this collection" links). For example, to search inside the Village Music Project, use the search query site:www.village-music-project.org.uk. Click here to see this work in practice. You can also be more specific - for example, to search for John Clare's tunes at that site, use the search query site:www.village-music-project.org.uk/abc/clare_J. Click here to see this work in practice. You can even combine a site search with other terms - for example, click here to search for John Clare's jigs. Finally, note that if any part of the query contains spaces then it should be enclosed in quote marks, e.g. site:"www.domain.com/file name with spaces". Why are the browseable index and/or the search results sorted in a funny order?Deciding how to sort an index of tune titles in multiple languages is not easy. One issue that arises is how to deal with definite & indefinite articles. For example, it is normal to ignore words such as the, a and an when sorting English titles or le, la, les and l' when sorting French ones. Accordingly, tune titles with leading articles are mostly rearranged before sorting and, for example, The Foxhunters Jig is changed to Foxhunters Jig, The. (One exception - currently - is that if the title, or part of the title, is enclosed in quote marks then is is not rearranged so, for example, "The Foxhunters Jig" is left unchanged.) However, even deciding which words are articles is not straightforward. For example, the word a means to in Spanish and related languages and is therefore not an article. And sometimes it does not even make sense to treat an article as such. For example, La Russe is a well-known tune in England and would usually be found amongst the Ls even though its title is clearly French. Accordingly, different collections have different sets of articles assigned to them. Almost certainly, some of these are wrong, so let me know if you spot something odd. Another issue that arises is sorting characters with accents. For example, in Scandinavia it's common to put them (e.g. characters such as å or ø) at the end of the alphabet after z. However, this is not the practice in Southern Europe and English speakers tend to just ignore accents altogether (sorry). It would also make the software more complicated. Accordingly, the tune titles are sorted as if all the letters are unaccented and as if all the punctuation and spaces were removed from the title. Finally, the search allows you to sort by "title" or by "file". Sorting by "title" just sorts the tune titles of the search results alphabetically as discussed above. Sorting by "file" sorts them alphabetically by the URL of the abc file they come from and then by their position in that file. This is useful for keeping results from the same file or collection together. Does it sort the results by relevance?No, not yet. Why doesn't it remember my search options?Because I haven't done that bit yet. When I implement cookies in the server, it should remember what you did last time. For now, however, if you want to "save" particular settings, I suggest you click on one of the following links below and bookmark that page.
Does it search musically / thematically / by melodic contour (Parsons code)?Not yet, but it will. For now, try one of the other search engines on the search page. midi playersIf you are having problems listening to tunes on the website, please read this section in full. How can I listen to a tune?When you do a search (or look at a tune page) you should see something like one of these images:
Notice that at the top right of every tune there is a little midi player embedded in the page. However which midi player you see will depend on your browser and how your computer is set up. If you are using Internet Explorer, you will probably see a minimised version of Windows Media Player looking like this: 
If you are using another browser (e.g. Firefox, Safari, Chrome), you should see a minimised version of QuickTime looking like this: 
However, sometimes (for example, if you have installed iTunes) you may see the QuickTime player even if you are using Internet Explorer. Both players allow you to play / pause a tune and adjust the volume. Windows Media Player also allows you to change the speed (right click on the player and select Play Speed). Alternatively you can click on the "midi" link underneath the tune title (on the left hand side of the page). This will either open up the full version of Windows Media Player (i.e. one that is not embedded in the webpage) or take you to a new web page with the QuickTime player showing. How can I download the midi file?If you would like to download the midi file of the tune, for example to add it to your music collection, then you have a number of options:
I want to use Windows Media Player in Internet Explorer but all I get is QuickTime.Sometimes it can happen that when you install Quicktime or iTunes or even a new browser, Internet Explorer is reconfigured to use QuickTime to play midi files. According to Microsoft, the best way to deal with this is to reinstall Windows Media Player. It is not immediately obvious how to uninstall Windows Media Player, but there is a helpful guide here. Then it is straightforward to download and install it again. Finally, if you are prompted by a "MIME Type Configuration" dialog which says "Some of the MIME types previously associated with the QuickTime plugin are currently associated with other applications. Should I restore these MIME type associations to QuickTime?", you should select "No". (I can't guarantee this will solve the problem, but it worked fine for me.) Help - I can't play anything.Some people have reported that they cannot play tunes on the abc website, even though they can play sound files at other sites. I'm trying to find a fix for this so if anyone can offer any suggestions they would be most welcome. Here are some configuration things to check. At a very minimum you will need to download and install QuickTime (should work on any computer) or Windows Media Player (will only work on PCs). You will also need to use a browser other than Opera. If you have checked the above and it's still not working please email me stating:
I may not be able to help you, but it would be useful to know where the problems lie. Why does the QuickTime midi player occasionally make a horrible noise as it starts to play?I don't know. It's either a bug in QuickTime, or something to do with its connection to the sound card. At any rate, I don't think it's a problem with the abc website and so there's not much I can do to fix it. Sorry. technobabbleWhat if a tune contains errors?The staff notation and midi files are generated by abcm2ps and abcMIDI respectively. It is impressive to note that of the 36,000 tunes included when the abc tune search was first set up, less than 1% caused abcm2ps problems and only 0.1% of the remaining tunes caused abcMIDI problems. As far as I know, all the problems are caused by mangled abc, rather than bugs in these packages (and also this is not to suggest that abcm2ps is less robust than abcMIDI, since only tunes that had been successfully processed by abcm2ps were passed to abcMIDI). Why does the staff notation shown in the search results look odd?In order to show the search results in a compact format, the tune search attempts to display just the first line of each tune. Although the mechanism for doing this is a little crude, it works most of the time. However, it ignores most of the fields in the tune and in particular the V:voice field, so that for tunes with multiple voices, only the first line of the first voice is shown. Nonetheless, if you see a result that looks odd, then please report it so that I can improve the code. Which browsers are supported?The abc tune search should work in most of the major browsers.
One exception is Opera, which does not implement the <embed> tag in the same way as all the others. This means that, in Opera, you will not see an embedded midi player and that the first tune on the page starts playing immediately the page loads. Whilst this is not a problem for viewing individual tune pages, it is unhelpful for looking at search results. Can I download abcnotation.com with a website copier / grabber?No! Within five weeks of the website being launched, it crashed twice because of users trying to download / copy / grab the entire site. On the second occasion it was down for two days because I was away from home with no internet access. Leaving aside the extra work that this causes me, it seems very unfair on other users. As a result, the server will check for, and prevent, accesses from copiers / grabbers. In addition, repeat attempts will result in the offender having their access to the site denied entirely. If you are reading this because you have seen a warning message in a browser and think it may be in error, just refresh the page manually - it should work without any problems. If you are reading this because you are seeing repeated 403 error pages and think you may have been denied access, then please contact me. miscellaneousAcknowledgementsMany thanks to:
When is a FAQ not a FAQ?Good question! Currently I'm writing this page as if the questions above were regularly asked by users of the abc tune search. However, the tune search is still in development - nobody but me has seen this page and so nobody has asked any questions about it. Hopefully - in a few years time - the list on this page will be worthy of being called Frequently Asked Questions. For now, however, it's more like a list of Questions I Think One Might Ask, or QITOMA for short (which has quite a nice ring to it). Or sometimes - when I consider how much longer this is taking than I thought it would; when I wonder if it will ever be finished; when I have doubts about anyone ever even seeing the pages, let alone asking questions about them - sometimes, I think of it more as a list of Frequently Unasked Questions, or FUQ for short. Thanks for reading this far - I hope you enjoy the site.
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