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Author Topic: Tune Book Database Project  (Read 14330 times)

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Pete Dunk

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Tune Book Database Project
« on: October 03, 2012, 07:13:43 PM »

The recent debate about the South Downs Jig in Tune of the Month has highlighted a problem for me, I don't know what's in my fairly large collection of music books well enough to know if I have the music for a particular tune. Anahata pointed out that South Downs is in Nick Barber's English Selection, a fairly recent publication that I bought as soon as I spotted it but I didn't know the contents well enough to know that I had this version of the tune.

I've now embarked upon the mammoth task of cataloguing all of my tune books into a single spreadsheet by creating individual files for each book and copying the contents into the master spreadsheet. The info is simple, just three columns: Tune name - Book Name (copy and paste sorts that field out in seconds!) - Page Number.
In the tune name column each alternative title shown in the book gets its own entry on a seperate line to make searching easier.

It strikes me that a number of music books will be owned by several other members of this forum who also might like to have a way of knowing which tunes they have music for. So is anyone interested in sharing the workload and swapping files?

So far I have files for the following books:

The Fiddler’s Tunebook
Nick Barber’s English Choice
Nick Barber’s English Selection
John Kirkpatrick’s English Choice
Pauline Cato’s Northumbrian Choice
Paul Hardy’s Sessions Tunebook
Airs for Pairs
More Airs for Pairs
Scottish Airs for Pairs

Here's a list of the other books I own (yes, there are a lot!), if you have any of these books and you are willing to make and swap files with myself and others please post in the thread or PM me. I'm willing to email a freebie Excel file for a book I'm sure many people will have, The Fiddler's Tunebook, I would have attached it here but the file type isn't allowed so PM me with your email address if you want a copy of the file.

Code: [Select]
Billy Pigg – The Border Minstrel
The Lewes Favourites
Mally’s Cotswold Morris Book Vol. 1
Mally’s Cotswold Morris Book Vol.2
Mally’s North West Morris Book
Before the Night Was Out
Dave Townsend’s English Dance Music Vol. 1
Dave Townsend’s English Dance Music Vol. 2
Pete Loud’s Collection of Northumbrian, Tyneside and Other Traditional Tunes
The Clough Family of Newsham
Music of Ireland – Where’s the Crack?
Music of Ireland – Fire Away Now!
Music of Ireland – A Mighty Tune!
Music of Ireland – The Big Session
Music of Ireland – Give us Another
Music for the Sets – Yellow
Music for the Sets – Blue
Peeping Tom Tunebook
The Fiddler of Helperby
Traditional Tunes for Two Fiddles Vol. 1
Traditional Tunes for Two Fiddles Vol. 2
The Village Band Book Vol. 1
The Village Band Book Vol. 2
Benjamine’s Book
Chippindale’s Cheery Chunes
Hampshire Dance Tunes (Pyle Manuscript)
Bal Folk
Dansons La Morvandelle
Garners Gay
Hardcore English
The Great Northern Tune Book  (William Vickers ms)
Bear-Bones
Dancing With Ma Baby
The Fiddle Music of James Hill
The Charlton Memorial Tune Book
The Northumbrian Piper’s Duet Book
A Repertoire of Variations for the Northumbrian Smallpipes
Sea Air (Nigel Hallett)
Da Roup (Nigel Hallett)
When the Snows of Winter Fall (Craig, Morgan, Robson)
Picking Sooty Blackberries (Cockersdale)
Traditional Music of Britain and Ireland – Slip Jigs and Waltzes
Traditional Music of Britain and Ireland – Jigs & Quicksteps, Trips & Humours
Traditional Music of Britain and Ireland – Reels & Rants, Flings & Fancies
Traditional Music of Britain and Ireland – Hornpipes & Breakdowns, Clog & Step Dances
The Master Collection of Dance Music for the Violin
Three Extraordinary Collections (ms collections)
Kentish Hops
Ho-ro-gheallaidh – session tunes for Scottish fiddles
The Dorchester Hornpipe
William Winter’s Quantocks Tune Book
The Old and the New (Robin Dunn)
O’Carolan for Everyone
Lincolnshire Collections Vol.1 (Joshua Gibbons ms)
Sully’s Irish Music Book
Ireland’s Best Carolan Tunes
Ireland’s Best Slow Airs
Ireland’s Best Session Tunes Vol. 1
Encyclopaedia Blowsabellica
New Tunes For Dancing
Rattle and Roll (Brian Peters)
« Last Edit: October 03, 2012, 07:44:03 PM by tallship »
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malcolmbebb

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Re: Tune Book Database Project
« Reply #1 on: October 03, 2012, 07:29:28 PM »

What would also be nice is a tool to sort through a directory of ABC files (with subdirectories) and make a list of the principal  header information such as title and key.

Takes ages to sort through the Lewes lot, almost as long a it takes to load the Melnet file...
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Graham Spencer

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Re: Tune Book Database Project
« Reply #2 on: October 03, 2012, 07:34:27 PM »

Interesting - I too have a couple of shelves full of tune books, but only 6 titles in common with yours.  There must be a hell of a lot of tunes out there.......
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Pete Dunk

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Re: Tune Book Database Project
« Reply #3 on: October 03, 2012, 07:42:09 PM »

What would also be nice is a tool to sort through a directory of ABC files (with subdirectories) and make a list of the principal  header information such as title and key.

Takes ages to sort through the Lewes lot, almost as long a it takes to load the Melnet file...

You can extract (multiple) individual fields from an abc file using ABC Explorer and paste them straight to a text file. It does add info you don't want though, like the title of the abc file after every entry so there's a fair bit of editing to do!
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malcolmbebb

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Re: Tune Book Database Project
« Reply #4 on: October 03, 2012, 07:49:37 PM »

That's far too much effort >:E I want something that will index the files, sort out the name and key lines (maybe one or two others), and give a list of the tunes and what file they're in.

I suppose I could write something but it would take far too much revision  :|glug
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Strigulino

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Re: Tune Book Database Project
« Reply #5 on: October 03, 2012, 07:59:43 PM »

There are mobile phone apps for such a thing, if you have an Android or iOS phone.  I use Tunepal and Tunebook myself.  If I did not have access to a smartphone, I'd keep all the ABCs in an Excel spreadsheet or Word table, myself.  Both sortable. And there's always good old fashioned card files.
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deltasalmon

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Re: Tune Book Database Project
« Reply #6 on: October 03, 2012, 09:13:02 PM »

One of the good sides to only having 10 tunes is that they all fit in your head. No need for extensive libraries
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Pete Dunk

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Re: Tune Book Database Project
« Reply #7 on: October 03, 2012, 09:47:53 PM »

There are mobile phone apps for such a thing, if you have an Android or iOS phone.  I use Tunepal and Tunebook myself.  If I did not have access to a smartphone, I'd keep all the ABCs in an Excel spreadsheet or Word table, myself.  Both sortable. And there's always good old fashioned card files.

I'm a bit bewildered by this! I have a single .abc file with over 1000 tunes in it. Are you telling me that Tunepal (which I have on my iPhone) and Tunebook can neatly extract all the titles as a list straight to a text file?  ???
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Anahata

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Re: Tune Book Database Project
« Reply #8 on: October 03, 2012, 09:54:56 PM »

What would also be nice is a tool to sort through a directory of ABC files (with subdirectories) and make a list of the principal  header information such as title and key.


I do this from time to time:
grep -r ^T: . >abcindex.txt
and when I want to find a title
grep "tune name fragment" abcindex.txt

I'm a bit bewildered by this! I have a single .abc file with over 1000 tunes in it. Are you telling me that Tunepal (which I have on my iPhone) and Tunebook can neatly extract all the titles as a list straight to a text file?  ???

I don't know about tunepal, by my Linux command line (which some folk  seems to think terribly antiquated and hard to use) would do this in a flash:
grep ^T: bigfile.abc

(searches for all lines beginning with "T:" and lists those lines)
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Helena Handcart

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Re: Tune Book Database Project
« Reply #9 on: October 03, 2012, 10:00:12 PM »

There are mobile phone apps for such a thing, if you have an Android or iOS phone.  I use Tunepal and Tunebook myself.  If I did not have access to a smartphone, I'd keep all the ABCs in an Excel spreadsheet or Word table, myself.  Both sortable. And there's always good old fashioned card files.

I'm a bit bewildered by this! I have a single .abc file with over 1000 tunes in it. Are you telling me that Tunepal (which I have on my iPhone) and Tunebook can neatly extract all the titles as a list straight to a text file?  ???

Hmm... if Tunepal can't do it I'm pretty sure I could do it with SQL, as long as each of the titles is flagged with the 'T:' prefix that is.   In 'real life' I am a database developer y'see.
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malcolmbebb

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Re: Tune Book Database Project
« Reply #10 on: October 03, 2012, 10:07:58 PM »

My Windows box doesn't understand grep; and I've forgotten the login to the Linux partition on my laptop LOL.

Although extracting just the T: lines is a start, it would be dead handy to extract the _corresponding_ K: line. However, to be really useful - it's not much use knowing you've got the bl**dy tune if you don't know where - the filename would be handy. Or path...

(I really, really don't get on with databases. My head says they should be straightforward but it just doesn't work for me)
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Mike Hirst

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Re: Tune Book Database Project
« Reply #11 on: October 03, 2012, 10:09:29 PM »

What would also be nice is a tool to sort through a directory of ABC files (with subdirectories) and make a list of the principal  header information such as title and key.


I do this from time to time:
grep -r ^T: . >abcindex.txt
and when I want to find a title
grep "tune name fragment" abcindex.txt

I'm a bit bewildered by this! I have a single .abc file with over 1000 tunes in it. Are you telling me that Tunepal (which I have on my iPhone) and Tunebook can neatly extract all the titles as a list straight to a text file?  ???

I don't know about tunepal, by my Linux command line (which some folk  seems to think terribly antiquated and hard to use) would do this in a flash:
grep ^T: bigfile.abc

(searches for all lines beginning with "T:" and lists those lines)

cmd.exe equivalent of the above:

for %a in (*.abc) do  findstr /b "T:" "%a"
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Anahata

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Re: Tune Book Database Project
« Reply #12 on: October 03, 2012, 10:16:38 PM »

I was going to suggest that a database was overkill, but if you want to list/search by key and other header information, it would not be hard to scoop all that out of a collection of ABC file and load it into a database.

Then, whereas my system can tell me there are 169 tunes in my VMP Mittel in a fraction of a second, a MySQL database could do the same for a million of them.


Code: [Select]
anahata@schubert:~/abc/mittel$ grep ^T: mittelw.abc | wc
    169     595    4824
You can get tools lilke grep for Windows  ;)

for %a in (*.abc) do  findstr /b "T:" "%a"
There ya go  ;)
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Helena Handcart

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Re: Tune Book Database Project
« Reply #13 on: October 03, 2012, 10:21:16 PM »

I never knew this forum was geek central as well as melodeon heaven  (:)

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Re: Tune Book Database Project
« Reply #14 on: October 03, 2012, 10:27:47 PM »

Like Anahata, I use Linux too; it is easy to extract information from the header of each tune. Cygwin is a free tool available for use on Windows, but I suspect the average Windows user would find it a challenge. I think simplicity is best and would write a script to do this using nawk or do as Anahata does with grep instead of messing about with SQL databases, however the Melnet file contains over 15,000 tunes, so to extract three lines from each header would result in a text file of 45,000 lines. It is better to keep the data in readable text format, so that it remains accessible via use of a simple text editor. Databases have a habit of becoming corrupted and otherwise inaccessible.
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malcolmbebb

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Re: Tune Book Database Project
« Reply #15 on: October 03, 2012, 10:33:02 PM »

however the Melnet file contains over 15,000 tunes,

Then there's six or seven Lewes files; Paul Hardy's stuff; my own collection of odds and sods; the files from the Morris Ring site (although I have a head start on those); etc... that's where it would really come in. Add a few hyperlinks - geek central here we come.
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Dino BPII.
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Helena Handcart

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Re: Tune Book Database Project
« Reply #16 on: October 03, 2012, 10:35:50 PM »

Databases have a habit of becoming corrupted and otherwise inaccessible.

Only if you don't know what you're doing with them  ;)   I actually meant  I would use a SQL query to split the string efficiently and write the results to a text file, not create a SQL database to store the resulting data which is a whole other thing and would probably be overkill in this case.

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Helena Handcart

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Re: Tune Book Database Project
« Reply #17 on: October 03, 2012, 10:38:56 PM »

however the Melnet file contains over 15,000 tunes,

Then there's six or seven Lewes files; Paul Hardy's stuff; my own collection of odds and sods; the files from the Morris Ring site (although I have a head start on those); etc... that's where it would really come in. Add a few hyperlinks - geek central here we come.

Sounds like fun... on my planet (which admittedly may not be exactly 'mainstream').
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Pete Dunk

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Re: Tune Book Database Project
« Reply #18 on: October 04, 2012, 12:08:56 AM »

Lawks, what have I started? I appear to have unearthed a collection of geeks, all of whom appear to know how to do this thing but none of them want to participate. As it happens extracting info from abc files would have been the next step. Here and now I'm asking if anyone would like to catalogue the tunes they have in printed books? I'm happy to send all of my .abc files to anyone willing to extract the relevant information, all of which will be most useful and a huge resource for lovers of traditional music and the use of abc notation as a tool for sharing tunes.

So stop telling me how easy it is and just for once do something that works. Demonstrate the skills that are apparently so simple, pretty please? The attached file has several tunes in it, please post an index of the tunes. The key would be nice too but not necessary.  ;)
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Mike Hirst

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Re: Tune Book Database Project
« Reply #19 on: October 04, 2012, 12:34:45 AM »

List of tune titles with key.  (:)
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