discussion of the Creative Commons Metadata work

[Jon Phillips <jon AT rejon.org>]

Great Laura...I'm forwarding to two other people who work at
creativecommons for possible inclusion on the creative commons website.

Jon

On Wed, 2005-11-30 at 16:11 -0800, Laura Michaels wrote:
> Was reading through the various file types listed at
> the Creative Commons web site that support metadata
> regarding copyright/cc related details.  I have a
> format to add to the list.  ABC is a format that can
> be used to easily exchange music.  ABC notation is
> ASCII text, so you can share songs by e-mail, over the
> web, etc.  There are also tools available to convert
> ABC notation to MIDI file format or to create
> postscript sheet music, among other functions.  One of
> the first things I checked into when I decided to
> start writing notes using ABC was how it handled
> copyright related material (basically metadata).  In
> the latest ABC specifications, there's a
> %%abc-copyright tag that can be used to store
> copyright or cc related information.  With the
> gracious consent of the abcmidi maintainer, I added
> some code to abc2midi (the abc to midi conversion
> utility), so that it would embed certain information
> from the %%abc-copyright tag into the midi file it
> creates.  At the time, I used it to embed information
> about releasing music under the Free Music Public
> License (FMPL) (http://www.fmpl.org/fmpl.html), but
> there's no reason it can't be used for cc information
> as well.  I have read that some countries don't
> recognize (c) as a valid copyright tag, so abc2midi
> will also let you enter an ASCII copyright symbol by
> using the code \xA9.  Basically, abc2midi's
> abc-copyright tag currently follows the C language's
> style of character conversion.  \n, \t, \r are
> recognized as linefeed, tab and carriage return.  \\
> represents a single \. \x followed by some numbers (or
> A-F) represents a hex number.  Therefore, \xA9 is
> recognized as the hex ASCII character represented by
> A9, thus putting that character into the midi file. 
> (A bit complicated, but if you're familiar with C it
> should make sense.)  Anyway, I thought I'd make
> mention of abc2midi's abilities for those interested
> in writing their own music.  ABC notation and abc2midi
> are a wonderful way for those of us who can read/write
> music but can't play an instrument to be able to
> create our own music.  You can find abc2midi as part
> of the abcmidi package at:
> http://abc.sourceforge.net/abcMIDI/
> There's also more information about ABC notation in
> general at that site.
> 
> 
> 
>       
>               
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-- 
Jon Phillips

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