Look into Birdland Musician's Assistant and indices

[wrwetzel]

I just visited this site for the first time in quite a while, was pleasantly surprised to find two new book indexes here, but disappointed that the format of the GreatGigBook index (includes an extra column) is incompatible with the other indexes and the extra column is not at the end, where it could be easily ignored. The extra column is completely unnecessary since it is the name of the file. Yes, I know, I can cut the column with one of the CSV tools but that is a manual special case that gets in the way of automated processing, something I may want to do when indexes are updated. The GreatGigBook index also includes the key along with the name. The key would be a sensible extra column but it does not belong with the name as it complicates using the name in searches. That last point is of present concern to me as I wrote a little routine to search for the name of every song in an index on YouTube and generate a table of links.

Update: I just discovered that rbblues.csv has column titles while the others do not .

I'm not suggesting any changes, just whining a bit in the hopes of consistency in future contributions.

[aspiers]

Thanks for highlighting this @wrwetzel and sorry for the very slow reply! Is there any chance you could submit corrections here? I'd gladly accept a pull request to fix any inconsistencies.

[wrwetzel]

Adam, I have finally completed work on my "Birdland Musician's Assistant" program and I believe it it ready for testing by a few 'friendly' users. I put you in that category because of your experience with fakebook indexes. Have a look at:

https://birdland.wrwetzel.com/

Be sure to also have a look at the documentation as I acknowledge you in the Credits section. Birdland includes your indexes cleaned up just a bit.

Thanks, Bill

[aspiers]

Wow!! Looks like an amazing piece of work, and for Linux too! Will definitely give it a go when I get time - apologies in advance that this will not happen for a while, the day job is leaving no time for music at the moment sadly, but it will certainly happen, hopefully within the next month or two!

I have linked to it from this repo's README. Thanks so much for the credits too.

This reaffirms my belief in the power of open data (thanks to the genius and humour of Hans Rosling for opening my eyes to this principle).

If you are able to submit your cleanups back to this repo at any point, that would be fantastic. Thanks again for sharing!

[wrwetzel]

Adam, Thanks much for your kind words and the link in your README. I've been at this since December, 2021, and a bit burned out by it. I'll deal with bug fixes immediately but probably not much more index cleanup for a while. I have included your raw indexes, updated with anything I could change with simple edits. There are a class of other updates that I make by applying set of changes while processing the raw indexes, not simple edits.

Your updated indexes are at:

https://github.com/wrwetzel/Birdland/tree/main/src/Index-Sources/AdamSpiers/Raw-Index

And the processed raw indexed, converted to compressed json are the files starting with 'Asp' at:

 https://github.com/wrwetzel/Birdland/tree/main/src/Music-Index

Bill

[wrwetzel]

If you do dig into these processed files be sure to have a look at the 'Normalized Titles' paragraph in the documentation:

https://birdland.wrwetzel.com/_build/html/birdland.html

and the 'Page Number, Sheet Number, Title Number' for a little terminology. The 'Normalized Titles' describes a bit of the processing done to the titles and the approach to corrections.

Bill

[aspiers]

Thanks a lot for the info! I'll look into that at some point when I have more time :-)

[aspiers]

I've removed the extra column from GreatGigBook, however I still want to look at your work more closely, so renaming this issue.