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| Jack Campin wrote:
| > > many people who use JC's Tune Finder will just want the gif or midi
| > > as they wouldn't know what to do with the abc. For such a user, an
| > > automatic fixer would be an improvement even if it only worked for
| > > some of the tunes.
| > > Perhaps the best of all solutions would be to detect the bad tunes
| > > and notify their owners so the problem can be fixed at source.
| >
| > AAARGH!!! if some piece of software out there was going to niggle me
| > about every ABC tune I've been responsible for that it couldn't handle
| > I'd pull the whole damn lot off the Internet.
Frank Nordberg replied:
| Don't worry Jack, it ain't gonna happen.
You're right. In fact, I've thought about the making my Tune Finder
make a guess at the email address. You might be surprised at how
feasible it is. However, an automatic message strikes me as a very
bad idea. It's not quite spam, but it's a related concept. If I did
it, what I'd do is (as someone has already suggested) have the tune
extraction code generate a page describing the problems and supplying
the requestor with a link to the error log and an email address. They
could do with this as they wish. It would then take human action to
send email, and nobody would be flooded with machine-generated email
messages.
But I've only thought about this; I'm not sure I even want to spend
any time implementing it. There are more important things in this
world to waste time on. Playing music is one.
| But you've got a point. I have myself posted about a hundred piano
| pieces in "BarFly ABC", simply because there's no way abc2ps can render
| those pieces properly. I would just hate having my e mail inbox filled
| up with "error messages".
This is a major reason why an automatic message is a bad idea. The
fact is that abc has developed several branches for different sets of
users. This is both a good and bad thing. It's good because it is a
force for making ABC into a more capable notation. It's bad because
it produces incompatible ABC. This is another way that ABC is like
traditional staff notation. I personally hope the process will
continue, with people pushing for new features and for compatibility.
As the owner of a somewhat significant ABC web site, the problem that
I'm trying to get people talking about is that my Tune Finder is
often asked for tunes that have ABC that's not compatible with the
tools that my site uses. Barfly extensions are a good example of
this. I can't very well adopt Barfly as one of my site's tools,
because it is a GUI tool, and those don't work all that well when
called by CGI scripts. It's inevitable that people working on GUI
tools will do things a lot differently than people working on CGI
scripts. My concern in this case would be how to detect the
incompatibilities and "correct" them so that my tools can handle the
ABC sensibly.
However, the example that I presented was not one using extensions.
It was one that had been badly damaged, probably by email software,
and probably not with the owner's knowledge. This sort of damage is
quite common. I doubt that any ABC users will defend it. The question
is how to recover from it gracefully. In this example, what comes out
in the PS or GIF or MIDI is garbage, and is not at all what was
intended. I'd guess that the owners of such files would be happy to
get one or two messages describing the problem. If you put a tune on
the web, presumably you intend that others download it and use it.
Damage like this will turn the tune into garbage for a great many
users, and I'd guess that most people would quickly fix such problems
when someone points it out.
Meanwhile, users of the Tune Finder have a problem that I get a fair
amount of email about. Many of those users don't have a clue as to
what has gone wrong. They just see music that is bizarre and clearly
has something badly wrong. Many of the users don't stand much of a
chance of fixing it themselves. It does seem to me that a lot of this
sort of damage (and some extensions) can be fixed in most cases. The
problem is how to successfully recognize just the damaged ABC and not
correct things that don't need correcting. Fixing extensions that my
tools don't recognize is a minor problem. Both abc2ps and abc2midi
tend to "pseudo-recognize" extensions by ignoring them, which is good
enough in most cases.
Perhaps the idea of presenting users with a special page that says
"This file appears to be seriously damaged somehow" and giving them
pointers or a menu of things to do about it might be the best way to
deal with it.
Such special pages might be a good idea in general. It would be nice
if users could get at the options for abc2ps and abc2midi, and the
only way to do this from a browser is via web pages that present the
options, let you choose what you want, and then you push a Submit
button to get the output. I'm seriously considering this as my next
set of Tune Finder hack^H^H^H^Hextensions.
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