Tunebook ABC

This is a transcription of all the tunes in the Tuneworks Tunebooks into ABC notation and a set of tools to process that into various useful formats.

See https://www.brsn.org.uk/tunebook-abc/ for the processed result.

Processing

All the tunes are represented by ABC file fragments in the abc/ (first edition) and abc2/ (second edition) directories. Their file names, and the X: field reference numbers inside them, are based on the two-digit page number on which the tune appears in the Tunebook and a two-digit sequence number within that page.

There is a Makefile which processes these fragments into various formats (a multi-tune 'ABC tunebook', PDF in various formats, etc.). This was written to work on MacOS but should be compatible with most Unix-ish environments. The Makefile assumes that reasonably recent copies of the following programs are available somewhere on $PATH (all of which can be installed with Homebrew):

• abcm2ps (https://github.com/leesavide/abcm2ps/, http://abcplus.sourceforge.net/#abcm2ps)
• abc2midi (from the abcmidi package)
• dos2unix
• ps2pdf (from the Ghostscript package)
• python3
• git
• tclsh (from the tcl cask)
• exiftool
• fluidsynth
• lame

This work was lagely inspired by Paul Hardy's Tunebooks and his tunebook processs page heavily informed the processing pipeline.

Licensing

The transcription into ABC, the results of processing them, and the original processing tools (but not the music itself) is licenced under the terms of the GNU General Public License. In addition, the transcribed ABC files and the results of processing them into various other formats distributed from https://brsn.org.uk/tunebook-abc/ are also licensed under the Creative Commons 'Attribution ShareAlike (CC BY-SA)' licence.

See the file LICENCE.txt for more details.