abc version of Nottingham Music Database

The Nottingham Music Database maintained by Eric Foxley contains over 1000 Folk Tunes stored in a special text format. Using NMD2ABC, a program written by Jay Glanville and some perl scripts, the bulk of this database has been converted to abc notation.

The Nottingham Collection

Jigs (340 tunes)
Hornpipes (65 tunes)
Morris (31 tunes)
Playford (15 tunes)
Reels A-C (81 tunes)
Reels D-G (84 tunes)
Reels H-L (93 tunes)
Reels M-Q (80 tunes)
Reels R-T (92 tunes)
Reels U-Z (34 tunes)
Slip Jigs (11 tunes)
Waltzes (52 tunes)
Christmas Carols and Songs (13 tunes)
Ashover collection (46 tunes) - the IPR associated with the original NMD format collection reside with Mick Peat (address available from Nottingham Music Database Home Page). For more information, see The Village Music Project.

You can download everything as one large zip file. Note : this unzips to give unix-style text files, rather than PC-style text files (i.e. end-of-line is represented by newline rather than carriage return and newline).

Technical Notes

These tunes have not been checked by hand, so there may well be mistakes here and there. The Nottingham Music Format has a notation for repeating previous bars, so if this has been incorrectly handled you may find entire bars which are wrong - this will certainly be the case if you uploaded this collection before 12th October 1996. There are places where part labels are used not to mark a part but to write some other text above the stave. If you can't make sense of the abc, try looking at the source in the original database. This collection last uploaded on 12th October 1996 after finding and correcting a bug in one of the Perl scripts.

The interpretation of numbers has caused particular problems. These can denote triplets (in the case of 3), first or second repeats (in the case of 1 or 2) or fingerings. In a number of places, fingering notation has been misinterpreted.

This page maintained by James Allwright. Last updated 25th November 1996.