Welcome to TuneBook Live!

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This is a database of tunes. Its main interest is with various traditional forms of northern and western European music, and their north American relatives - the jigs and reels, polka, polska, schottische, bourrée, etc - but it also has many things that don't fit that description; whatever comes along. The material is available as conventional musical notation and in machine-useable formats (PDF, midi, ABC). There are no recordings.

Earlier versions of the site went under the name of "Richard Robinson's TuneBook", but that's no longer appropriate, since it's now anybody's - if you register a name & password, you have access to handy facilities to input (edit, transpose, etc) your tunes, make up set lists and leadin-sheets, and so on. Anything you see done here, you can do yourself.

Most of the material here is in the public domain; but it's not safe to assume it all is, many people are making new tunes in these idioms. If you were thinking of making public use of what you find here, or if you're adding material, you should be aware of this. Please read the copyright notice.

This is a work in progress, don't be suprised if things change from time to time. If something goes wrong please let me know, using the 'contact' link in the footer, so I can fix it.

What's new

Updates - Chronologically-ordered wittering about what I've been doing ...

December 2011 :

(update) Having been rejecting the 'bots for a few weeks now, I notice that, firstly, googlebot and baiduspider are still trying, and secondly, that the hitrate has collapsed massively. Looks as though the 'bots made it unusable to the point where everyone else gave up, I should have spotted what was going on earlier. How very depressing.

November 2011 :

The site has been becoming increasingly unusable over the last few weeks - it's been swamped with search 'bots, consuming resources to an extent approaching denial-of-service, so far as real live humans were concerned. Sorry about that. Since they don't seem to play politely with robots.txt, I've taken more aggressive measures to make them behave; it should be more responsive from now on.

Added aliases - you can set alternative human-readable URLs for your material. Added some for the important collections and documents. ie http://richardrobinson.tunebook.org.uk/collection/VillageMusicProject, http://richardrobinson.tunebook.org.uk/collection/Winder, and so on.

Added http://code.google.com/p/abcjs/ to the "simple" tune editor; it renders abc on the fly as you type. Seems to work well.

And all sorts of other stuff that I never got round to commenting on. We now have a complete copy of the Village Music Project.

more ...

Miscellaneous points

Miscellaneous

more ...

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This site has no funding other than what I put into it. It's taken me a lot of work to build, and the server costs money to run. So, if people were to feel like making a contribution once in a while, it would be very much appreciated. It would also enable me to buy more power for the server and make things run faster ... I thank you. Anything donated here will go towards the upkeep of this site and its author.

Please consider making a contribution towards the upkeep of this site.