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A Little About This Site
This site is run by Paul Schwartz as a non-profit (very non-profit) service to the worldwide concertina community. I love concertinas and concertina music, so it's my way of helping spread the word and the joy that is anglo (okay, and other types too) concertinas. Specifically, I really like traditional Irish music played on concertinas, but I like just about any kind of music, and playing anything on the concertina is a lot of fun. But enough about me and the site -- here are some answers to questions you may come here seeking answers to:
Why Register and Sign In?
I made it necessary to register to do some things on the site for several reasons. First of all, it offers a first line of defense (and a pretty good one) against abuse of the system from outside. Since you have to sign in with your password to see personal information (e-mail addresses mostly), internet "bots" that sweep sites collecting e-mail addresses end up with nothing. Same thing with people trying to use automated services to bulk-post junk ads or messages.
Finally, I like to think that something like concertinas doesn't require anonymity. It's hard to share and partake in the benefits of a community without giving a little bit back, and that's why I'd encourage you put in your personal information so others may benefit from what you may have to offer, and vice versa. If I never gave out my email address and hid behind an anonymous web site, this site wouldn't be very interesting.
Even though you may be registered, in order to see another member's information, you'll need to sign in when you first arrive back at this site. Your "session" will then be authenticated against your stored e-mail/password and if they match, you'll be all set for full access to all site features and functions. Sessions expire after an hour of inactivity in order to protect personal information. Well, actually, sessions expire after an hour of not requesting a page which requires you to be signed in, so don't be surprised if you're looking around and are suddenly asked to sign in again for certain features (posting messages, entering tunes, etc). I did this to minimize the number of times I have to hit the database which sits behind this site.
Do you need to use the "Sign Out" feature? No. Most people work from their own computer, so there is no issue here since sessions expire after an hour anyway. The only time you'd want to use this is if you were accessing your CONCERTINA.net account from someone else's computer or from an Internet Café or something.
Buy & Sell Classified Ads
A free service for buying and selling stuff related to music -- not exclusive to concertinas and concertina music! I reserve the right to ditch any ads I find questionable, offensive, or abusive of the service. I don't vouch for anything posted here, so buyer (and seller) beware! I'd recommend using an online escrow service like i-escrow (http://www.iescrow.com) for any major purchase, and remember -- without being too cynical -- if it's too good to be true, it probably is.
I'm always open to suggestions and comments, so please let me know. Please report abuse or other nastiness to me immediately.
The Tune-O-Tron
Okay, it's a pretty stupid name, but I just couldn't think of anything better without resorting to the usual boring names, most of which involve "base", as in "database" (yawn). Besides, I love all those old gadgets from years ago with names that use "o-tron" and "o-rama" in them.
What do those formats mean?
The picture you see on the detail page is simply a low-resolution jpeg file. It's meant as a preview. To print out sheet music, you should really use the PDF version, which is an Adobe Acrobat file which contains everything needed to print out the file in high resolution on any printer and on any computer platform. You may download a free Acrobat viewer application from Adobe (www.adobe.com). A MIDI file is simply a digital music (synthesized) version of the sheet music. It will only be as good as the original transcription. Your computer should already be set up to listen to MIDI files. If it's not, try visiting www.tucows.com or some other shareware site where you can download tons of free MIDI file players. Finally, I've also provided a link to the source ABC notation which you can download and import into an ABC program running on your own computer. To find out more about this notation system, be sure to visit Ceolas: http://www.ceolas.org/tunes/#abc.
Note that the tunes you put into the database do not have to be related to concertinas or Irish music.
I would highly recommend testing your ABC file using the Convert-A-Matic before inserting it into the database. This will help ensure that incomplete or incorrect ABC files don't clutter up the database.
It's important to remember that I don't own the copyright to anything in the tunes database. I ask that you please only input tunes that are in the public domain or that you have full rights to. Please do not input anything with a questionable copyright status. If you're not sure, to protect me and this service, I ask that you please just don't put it in. And if you notice something that's a no-no, just let me know and I'll remove it immediately. This is very important to the future of such a service, so I really do ask that you be careful and respect copyrights.
One not-so-obvious feature of the Tune-O-Tron is the ability to mark your tunebook as "public". When you do this, you'll be presented with a special URL which you can give out to people to allow them to view your tunebook. This could certainly be useful in a number of situations, for example, letting a group of musicians know about a new tune you'd like to play when you get together next, or sending out a new tune to students.
Hey, what happened to my tune files? There were there a minute ago and now I get a "Not found" error!
The only thing in permanent storage is the ABC "source code" in the database. The JPG, PDF, ABC, and MIDI files are generated on-the-fly as you request a tune detail page. To keep all those temporary JPG, PDF, ABC, and MIDI files from filling the server hard drive, they are automatically deleted 20 minutes after they are created. If you need to create them again, simply click "reload" on the tune detail page and the files will be re-created for you (and they'll live for another 20 minutes).
Please don't e-mail me asking if I have a certain song or tune. I don't. Use the Tune-O-Tron Message Board for that. I also can't change the way the sheet music looks or MIDI files sound -- I didn't write that software, I only glued together other people's code (see Geek-Talk below) into a web-based system. If your ABC file doesn't come out right, it's probably not complete or has mistakes, or maybe it's due to a bug in the software doing the conversion. Either way, sorry, but I can't do much about it. On the other hand, if you're familiar with abc2ps, abc2midi and ghostscript (gs) and if you know that some command-line option will fix a problem that's showing up in the sheet music, let me know and I can probably incorporate the fix into my scripts.
To find out more about ABC, visit Ceolas: http://www.ceolas.org/tunes/#abc.
User-Contributed Comments
Some pages here have an option to add user comments. I love user comments in web pages, since it's a great way to share knowledge (or ask relevant questions) without having to bother sending it to an administrator (okay, me) and then wait for them to get around to posting it in the appropriate spot. I do rely on people's better judgement though to keep the comments useful and interesting... If you notice anything abusive or otherwise inappropriate, please just let me know and I'll remove it immediately.
Do You Use Cookies?
Yes, but just to maintain very basic information necessary to make the various features, functions, and security work properly. I don't store any sort of personal information in cookies at all -- just meaningless codes that only mean something to my software. It is possible to make a site like this work without cookies, but it's a nightmare and requires a lot more programming and makes the site a lot more difficult to maintain, so please just turn on cookies in your browser if you have them off. Cookies are actually quite safe and have simply gotten a bad rap of late mostly because of misinformation spread in the popular press. More than anything else, they are simply an extremely useful tool for web programmers and allow for dynamic and interesting web sites.
I'm A Geek And Want To Know How You Did All This
Okay. The web and database servers run under FreeBSD. FreeBSD is an excellent, fast, very reliable, and free (Unix) operating system. Maybe Windoze 4000 will be as reliable as FreeBSD from 1998. This server has been up (no reboot) for 441 days as of January 20, 2009. And when it does go down, it's usually only for some hardware upgrade and not because of a crash. The database software is MySQL, which is very fast and powerful, and basically free.
All the actual programming was done my me (Paul Schwartz) in PHP, which is the absolute best web development scripting language out there if you ask me. PHP is extremely popular now, is very fast (faster than Microsloth ASP from what I've read), stable, multi-platform, and yes, free. I decided to write everything from scratch for the experience, and also because I like knowing the guts the software I use, so that modifications and fixes are easier. This way I could also tie all the systems together using a single registration/user system, which is obviously something I would not have been able to do (or it would have been a lot more difficult) if I had just installed a bunch of freeware Perl scripts. Not that there's anything wrong with Perl, but PHP was designed from the ground up for the web, and it shows. It's a joy to work with, and allows for very fast development. I also like the structure of PHP (it's more like C than Perl). Most ASP stuff I've seen (and most Microsoft products in general actually) and Perl just looks like a big mess to me.
How does the Tune-O-Tron work? It stores ABC text in a database. The JPG, PDF, and MIDI files are created by stringing together (again, using MySQL and PHP) the following software: abc2ps, GhostScript, and abc2midi.
I'm Stinking Rich And Want To Buy Your Site For ONE MEELION DOLLARS.
Okay.
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