Re: [abcusers] Folk band

[Simandl124]

Frank Nordberg wrote:

| Unless somebody can recommend some good bulk downlaoding software,
| of course 

The Windows web-spider application Teleport Pro is pretty good. The free 
version has a limit of 500 files per download session, but for most purposes 
that's plenty. See:

http://www.tenmax.com/

 - Matt

Re: [abcusers] Folk band

[D-Man]

On Fri, Jul 13, 2001 at 07:04:29PM +0200, Frank Nordberg wrote:
 
| Unless somebody can recommend some good bulk downlaoding software

I almost forgot : for Windows users there's "Hands Down".  It was
mentioned in PC Magazine once, and is free ($$ not freedom, IIRC) on
ZDNet.

-D

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Re: [abcusers] Folk band

[D-Man]

On Fri, Jul 13, 2001 at 07:04:29PM +0200, Frank Nordberg wrote:

| Unless somebody can recommend some good bulk downlaoding software,
| of course 

'wget' for *nix (command line) or "gtm" (GNOME Transfer Manager).
Incidentally, gtm uses wget as the backend implementation.  With gtm I
can simply drag a URL from galeon (or mozilla) onto the applet in the
panel (if you haven't used GNOME this will sound like gibberish) and
it downloads it.  Pretty nice, really.  GTM also has a gui to manage a
list of downloads and a sort of "history" (it doesn't remove the URLs
unless you say so, it just flags it as "done").

-D

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Re: [abcusers] Folk band

[Frank Nordberg]

Jack Campin wrote:
> 
> > I've accidentally written some band arrangements to a couple of
> > English, Irish and Scottish tunes. And since I'm not exactly an expert
> > on this subject, I wondered if someone who knows better than me could
> > have a look at:
> > http://www.musicaviva.com/folkband/
> > and tell me what they thought.
> 
> Godalmighty, HOW BIG IS IT???

More than 6 MB, I'm afraid. But there are links to the individual PDF
and midi files as well.

Actually right now there are *only* the individual files. Seems this
compressed archive thing was a really bad idea. Apart from all the
problems already mentioned here, they also become a major pein in the
*** when I'm updating the collection (which I just did). So from now on
everybody has to grab the tunes one at a time. Unless somebody can
recommend some good bulk downlaoding software, of course (Mac-users
should try Interarchy).

I changed the URL too, btw, but I left a redirection page, so that
shouldn't be a problem for anyone.

> 
> BTW, "The Mason's Apron" and "The Bridal" are both Scottish (from the
> early 18th and late 17th centuries) and I am fairly sure "Harvest
> Home" is English.  "Brochan Lom", not "Brocham Lom" (the Scots title
> is "Orange and Blue").  "The Red-Haired Boy" is an Irish name for
> the Scots tune "Gilderoy", which in turn is probably a variant of an
> older English tune (known English versions of it are more recent than
> the Scots one, but there are zillions of them).

I was wondering a bit about Harvest home myself. The rest is news to me.
Thanks, Jack! :-)


Frank


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Re: [abcusers] Folk band

[Frank Nordberg]

Phil Taylor wrote:
> 
> I spent some time listening to the midi files last night, and I
> have to say that the arrangements are absolutely lovely.

Thanks :-) :-) :-)

>
> I can
> find very little to criticise.  For my personal taste, they
> sound a bit too (er) musically educated (I like my folk music
> with a bit more shit on its boots),

I agree. But once you start writing down parts - especially with such a
large ensemble - it's bound to sound a bit "educated". I just compared
the solo guitar part of Red-haired boy with how I actually play that
tune nowadays and it's certainly different!

There's an interesting parallel in what happened to jazz in the 1920s.
Fletcher Henderson had to hire in two extra reed men to get power enough
to cut through the noise at the clubs he played. More musicians meant
that the music had to be stricter organized and suddenly the rough New
Orleans/Chicago jazz had become smooth, sophisticated big band swing.

> 
> but it certainly makes for
> a different and interesting take on the music.

That's partly because they were written in Norway.
I once knew a half Brazilian half German girl. She told us that her
German relatives always wanted her to cook some Brazilian food when she
visited them. But she simply couldn't do that. Whatever she food she
tried to make in a German kitchen ended up tasting German.
It's the same with music. I grew up jamming gammeldans with my father
and sister, and it's simply not possible for me to get completely away
from that musical influence. In this particular case I didn't even
bother to try.

This leads to another interesting (although no exactly ABC related)
topic btw. The trad. music scene is becoming more and more
international, with musicians picking up influence from an ever growing
georgraphical area. This is all well and good, of course, but what
really happens to the *national* traditions? To use another gastronomic
metaphor. The food traditions of all western countries has been greatly
enrichened by various "ethnic" restaurants. This has had a lot of
positive effects, but frankly, sometimes it's hard to tell from taste
alone whether the food you're eating is supposed to be Chinese or Tex-Mex.

> 
> The reels (particularly the Irish reels) should go a bit faster,

I might keep it that way. The arrangements are mainly meant for kids
learning to play, you know.

>
> and the title of the Morpeth Rant is mis-spelled.

Sorry.

> 
> I have only one question really.  How on earth do you find the
> time?

Time is not a problem. Energy is. I make an arrangement of some kind
(not necessarily folk band) most every day, and I've found that to be
one of the jobs that actually gives me *more* energy to do everything else.


Frank

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Re: [abcusers] Folk band

[Jack Campin]

> I've accidentally written some band arrangements to a couple of
> English, Irish and Scottish tunes. And since I'm not exactly an expert
> on this subject, I wondered if someone who knows better than me could
> have a look at:
> http://www.musicaviva.com/folkband/
> and tell me what they thought.

Godalmighty, HOW BIG IS IT???

I started downloading the archive on a slow connection (probably slow
at both ends, I got a "broken pipe" error at one point) and gave up
after 2.6Mb.

BTW, "The Mason's Apron" and "The Bridal" are both Scottish (from the
early 18th and late 17th centuries) and I am fairly sure "Harvest
Home" is English.  "Brochan Lom", not "Brocham Lom" (the Scots title
is "Orange and Blue").  "The Red-Haired Boy" is an Irish name for
the Scots tune "Gilderoy", which in turn is probably a variant of an
older English tune (known English versions of it are more recent than
the Scots one, but there are zillions of them).

===  ===


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Re: [abcusers] Folk band

[Phil Taylor]

I spent some time listening to the midi files last night, and I
have to say that the arrangements are absolutely lovely.  I can
find very little to criticise.  For my personal taste, they
sound a bit too (er) musically educated (I like my folk music
with a bit more shit on its boots), but it certainly makes for
a different and interesting take on the music.

The reels (particularly the Irish reels) should go a bit faster,
and the title of the Morpeth Rant is mis-spelled.

I have only one question really.  How on earth do you find the
time?

Phil Taylor
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Re: [abcusers] Folk band

[Frank Nordberg]

Phil Taylor wrote:
> 
> It sounds as if your zipped midi files were in MacBinary format.
> You should be able to turn that off in your zip program (if you
> use Zipit, it puts the letters 'mb' in the right-hand column of
> the contents table.  Click on that to turn it off.)

Thanks, Phil. I'll try to remember that in the future. :-)


Frank

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Re: [abcusers] Folk band

[Phil Taylor]

Frank Nordberg wrote:

>But in any case it's not as if the compressed archives saves any
>downloading time. The self-extracting hqx archive is actually
>considerably *larger* than the individual files, while the zip archive
>only saves 8%. I just thought it'd be a good idea for visitors to just
>have to click on a single link.

Both midi and pdf are quite dense formats, so you can't compress them
much more.  Making a .zip or .sit file mostly has the advantage of
putting them together in one file.  If you make that a self-extracting
archive it gets a bit bigger, because you have added the code to
decompress it.  If you make that into .hqx it gets much bigger still,
because that's an ascii text representation and only uses seven of the
eight bits in each byte.  hqx is not really needed any longer, as
things get downloaded in binary mode now.

>I can answer two of the questions that puzzled Phil, though. The midi
>files are colour coded according to nationality. I usually remove such
>labels before uploading, since they'll only appear on Macs in any case,
>but in this case I forgot.
>As for the creator code, I routinely remove those from the midi files.
>It's mostly just a habit, but also because I think Macintosh users
>should be allowed to choose the application themselves. Again this
>shouldn't make any difference whatsoever to other computers.

OK.  If you want to mark a file as not belonging to any particular
program, you should set the creator to '', as that value is
reserved by Apple for that purpose.

It sounds as if your zipped midi files were in MacBinary format.
You should be able to turn that off in your zip program (if you
use Zipit, it puts the letters 'mb' in the right-hand column of
the contents table.  Click on that to turn it off.)

Phil Taylor


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Re: [abcusers] Folk band

[Frank Nordberg]

Tim Riley wrote:
> 
> There appears to be a (Mac-related?) header at the beginning of every
> midi file. If I removed the first 128 bytes (using a hex editor), WinAmp
> played the file fine.

Isn't life wonderful?

Guess it's time for me to trash tha d*** ZipIt and go for StuffIt
instead. The zip file is now replaced by a self-extracting .exe archive.

Apart from all that, how did you like the music?



Frank
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Re: [abcusers] Folk band

[Frank Nordberg]

Phil Taylor wrote:
> 
> Bert Van Vreckem wrote:
> >| To create a gzip, you should `tar' your files first:
> >|
> >|   tar cvf folkband.tar folkband/ | gzip
> >
> 
> On a Mac use SunTar to make the tar archive (you can set its options
> to leave out the resource forks) then drag that onto MacGzip.  You should
> be able to find both of these in any of the Mac software archives.

Got it. I already have both SunTar and Easy-GZ so I can do it.

But is it worth the extra 5 MB in this particular case?
I mean, surely every Linux/Unix user have some kind of batch downloading
software any way?


Frank Nordberg
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Re: [abcusers] Folk band

[D-Man]

On Thu, Jul 12, 2001 at 04:03:23PM +0200, Frank Nordberg wrote:
| Bert Van Vreckem wrote:
| > To create a gzip, you should `tar' your files first:
| 
| Oh. I thought .tar was just for text files.

tar actually stands for Tape ARchive because it was originally
developed for the purpose of storing multiple files from a disk onto a
backup tape.  It is sort of like a filesystem inside a file because
tapes only store sequencial data and don't have a filesystem like
disks do.  The most common use of tar nowadays is to bundle a bunch of
files into one file, usually so that they can be compressed by gzip.
gzip, unlike (pk)zip, only operates on a single file so the tar+gzip
combination works quite well.  It also follows the Unix philosophy of
"do one thing and do it well".

-D

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Re: [abcusers] Folk band

[Frank Nordberg]

Phil Taylor wrote:
> 
> There is something odd about these midi files on a Mac too...

Oh well, I guess I'll just give up this compression thing then.
I've put a mirror at
http://home.online.no/~frnordbe/folkband/
maybe that works better. (The mirror is on a Unix/Apache server, while
Musica Viva is Mac/WebStar)

But in any case it's not as if the compressed archives saves any
downloading time. The self-extracting hqx archive is actually
considerably *larger* than the individual files, while the zip archive
only saves 8%. I just thought it'd be a good idea for visitors to just
have to click on a single link.

I can answer two of the questions that puzzled Phil, though. The midi
files are colour coded according to nationality. I usually remove such
labels before uploading, since they'll only appear on Macs in any case,
but in this case I forgot.
As for the creator code, I routinely remove those from the midi files.
It's mostly just a habit, but also because I think Macintosh users
should be allowed to choose the application themselves. Again this
shouldn't make any difference whatsoever to other computers.

> 
> (Nice arrangements though, what I've listened to so far.)

Thanks :-)

Frank

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Re: [abcusers] Folk band

[Tim Riley]

Bert Van Vreckem wrote:
> I don't seem to be able to open your midi's, though (I'm using WinAmp on
> an NT 4.0 box.) The pdf's are fine, so it's not a corrupted zip file.

There appears to be a (Mac-related?) header at the beginning of every
midi file. If I removed the first 128 bytes (using a hex editor), WinAmp
played the file fine.
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Re: [abcusers] Folk band

[Frank Nordberg]

Bert Van Vreckem wrote:

> 
> And hopefully, you're going to apply the Open Audio Licence
>  to them? ;-)

Well, that license seems to be for recorded music, not scores. I guess
I'll eventually just add them to the Musica Viva collection. We'll see.

As I said, the arrangements came to be more or less by accident, so I
haven't given that very much thought yet. But of course any subscriber
to abcusers are free to use the music in their own bands.

> 
> To create a gzip, you should `tar' your files first:

Oh. I thought .tar was just for text files.

> 
> I don't seem to be able to open your midi's, though (I'm using WinAmp on
> an NT 4.0 box.) The pdf's are fine, so it's not a corrupted zip file.

Strange. They should be perfectly normal general midi files. Did you try
the links to the individual (unzipped) midis?


Frank


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Re: [abcusers] Folk band

[Phil Taylor]

Bert Van Vreckem wrote:
>| To create a gzip, you should `tar' your files first:
>|
>|   tar cvf folkband.tar folkband/ | gzip
>

On a Mac use SunTar to make the tar archive (you can set its options
to leave out the resource forks) then drag that onto MacGzip.  You should
be able to find both of these in any of the Mac software archives.

Phil Taylor
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Re: [abcusers] Folk band

[D-Man]

Just FYI,

On Thu, Jul 12, 2001 at 02:30:30PM +0200, Bert Van Vreckem wrote:
| To create a gzip, you should `tar' your files first:
| 
|   tar cvf folkband.tar folkband/ | gzip

Almost

tar cvf - folkband/ | gzip > folkband.tar.gz

You need tar to output the tar file on stdout so it can be piped into
gzip.  Then you need to redirect the output of gzip into a file (the
.tar.gz file) so it isn't "lost" after the terminal displays it.

This could, of course, be done with 2 commands and no piping.

| (or something like that) or, in one go:
| 
|   tar cvzf folkband.tar.gz folkband/

This is convenient, but only works with GNU tar (others, eg Solaris'
tar, complain about the unknown option 'z').

-D

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Re: [abcusers] Folk band

[Phil Taylor]

bert van vreckem wrote:
>I don't seem to be able to open your midi's, though (I'm using 
>WinAmp on an NT 4.0 box.) The pdf's are fine, so it's not a 
>corrupted zip file.
>

There is something odd about these midi files on a Mac too (I downloaded
the .hqx version).  They all appear with the default icon, but labelled
in different colours.  If you drag one onto QT Player it opens and
plays fine, but if you try to open it using the Open command either
in QTPlayer or SimpleText it appears as a folder in the dialog.  If
you try to open this "folder" you get the same file list as previously,
but with all the files greyed out.  Examination of a file with ResEdit
shows the file type to be Midi (correct) but the creator is completely
blank - not even whitespace chars there.  I didn't think that was
possible, and I suspect it's actually a string of ascii null characters.
ResEdit also shows that the file has a bunch of 'pref' resources, which
if present in the zipped version might account for the difficulty
of playing them on a Windows machine.  In theory, the resource fork
of a mac file should get separated when you zip it, and unpack into
a folder named rsrc.frk on a Windows machine, but sometimes it just
gets concatenated with the data, and therefore corrupts it.

(Nice arrangements though, what I've listened to so far.)

Phil Taylor
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Re: [abcusers] Folk band

[Bert Van Vreckem]

Frank Nordberg wrote:

> You see, I've accidentally written some band arrangements to a couple of
> English, Irish and Scottish tunes. And since I'm not exactly an expert
> on this subject, I wondered if someone who knows better than me could
> have a look at:
> http://www.musicaviva.com/folkband/
> and tell me what they thought.


And hopefully, you're going to apply the Open Audio Licence 
 to them? ;-)

To create a gzip, you should `tar' your files first:

  tar cvf folkband.tar folkband/ | gzip

(or something like that) or, in one go:

  tar cvzf folkband.tar.gz folkband/

I don't seem to be able to open your midi's, though (I'm using WinAmp on 
an NT 4.0 box.) The pdf's are fine, so it's not a corrupted zip file.

-- 
bert van vreckem

If Bill Gates had a nickel for every time Windows crashed...
Oh wait! He does!

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[abcusers] Folk band

[Frank Nordberg]

This hasn't got anything to do with ABC, but I thought I'd take the
chance asking some of the British traditional music experts here for
some help.

You see, I've accidentally written some band arrangements to a couple of
English, Irish and Scottish tunes. And since I'm not exactly an expert
on this subject, I wondered if someone who knows better than me could
have a look at:
http://www.musicaviva.com/folkband/
and tell me what they thought.

The scores are written for a seven piece band (flute, three(!) fiddles,
two guitars and double bass), but should be playable with most any
instrumentation - as long as the lead fiddle is there, of course.


Frank Nordberg
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