JC's ABC music collection
This is John Chambers' ABC music collection. First, a disclaimer for those who came here looking for recordings: There are no recordings of music here. If you don't understand how you can have a music site without recordings, you are definitely at the wrong site. If you are a musician who is interested in a simple, portable, plain-text music notation with software that will run just about anywhere, you might be at one of the right sites.
Here are links various events that I've provided music for:
program This is for events that don't fit into any of the classifications below.
Bob McQuillen Some of the tunes that Bob McQuillen wrote for us to play.
Italy Our small gang of people who like to play traditional Italian music occasionally plays for parties, worshops, and other "sessions".
Klezmer Traditional Jewish musical collections.
Scand Scandinavian musical events, mostly dances.
Vintage music from previous centuries.
Intl Music for "international" folk dances.
Scotland Scottish Country Dance sessions
test assorted testing stuff
xmas xmas songs/tunes
program Music for assorted programs I'm playing for
session Tunes for various New England "sessions"
Scotland Music sets for Scottish Country Dancing
Intl Tunes for Internationsl folk dancing
test/svg/ Shortcut to a current test directory.
I've been experimenting with a few tools to do useful things in directories full of .abc tune files:
[Session directory] - Session lister - Tune lister - Collection lister
These are "works in progress" that I've included here to get ideas for making them more useful.

What you'll find here

ABC education:
  • doc/ is my collection of ABC documents.
  • Chris Walshaw's ABC notation site, with a list of available software.
  • ABCintro.txt is a plain-text introduction to ABC.
  • ABCprimer.html is another introduction to ABC, in HTML.
  • Steve Mansfield's excellent ABC tutorial
  • ABCtutorial.html is a longwinded explanation of ABC.
  • ABC-FAQ.html is a collection of Frequently Asked Questions about ABC.
  • test/ is my collection of ABC test files.
    My ABC Tune Finder.
    This is lets you search the ABC tune-index files produced by the abcbot program. It shows the matching tunes, and lets you retrieve them in several formats. This page has been listed as a cool site by the Open Directory project. There is also an experimental version for those who may be curious about what I'm working on.
    My ABC entry and conversion page
    This not only lets you donate all your ABC tunes to my archive (for free!), but includes conversion to PS, PDF, GIF, PNG and MIDI.
    sh
    My motley collection of programs (mostly perl) for manipulating ABC files.
    • Indexes of ABC tunes
    There are a number of efforts underway to build indexes of the growing ABC sites on the Net. They all work rather differently. Here are some of them: In addition, some people have produced indexes to their own collections:

    Send corrections, contributions, and comments about copyrights to:

    Copyright:
    If a tune here is copyrighted and the owner objects to it being here, I will of course remove it. Or, preferably, I'd be happy to add the appropriate copyright information in the tune's headers, including email and/or web addresses. I'm always trying to complete the header information for tunes. So if you know of relevant attribution that is missing for any tune (especially if it's your tune), please send me email.