abc notation blog

Anyone who has visited the abc tune search more than once since the site was launched (just over a week ago) may have noticed the gradual evolution of the paragraph above the search box.

It’s gone through several variations already in the last week and now says:

IMPORTANT NOTE: Sorry, but there are no scores or lyrics for pop/rock music in the abc tune search (though you could try here). See the search help page for reasons why not.

Naively, I had imagined that people searching for stuff here would be looking for traditional music, so I hadn’t thought such a clarification was necessary.

But of course, you can easily end up on the tune search from a Google search, with no context about what abc is or isn’t and where it comes from.

And when I started to look at the logs of what people were searching for, it became clear that indeed that is happening.

Although mostly the searches are what you might expect (especially if you’re familiar with traditional music – someone, somewhere, has just done a search for “Scatter the mud”), already I’ve seen searches for Metallica, Iron Maiden and some Beatles songs.

So anyway, I put the paragraph up just so as not to strain the server with searches which are almost certain to be fruitless.

And then a couple of days later I found out about the LOTRO collections – at least one of which does indeed have Metallica songs in abc format.

However, they’re still not in the tune search (copyright issues and all that).

Chris

Tags: abc, abc tune, google, music, search, site, tune, tune search

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 at 10:35 pm and is filed under Tunes, Website. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.