A bit about FolkTuneFinder

FolkTuneFinder is a search engine for folk tunes. If you're trying to find the dots or want to listen to a tune and you know the title or some of the melody, you've come to the right place. Once you've found a tune you like, FolkTuneFinder lets you bookmark it for later. You can also browse the site for popular tunes, other peoples' favourites, or just click 'random'.

How many tunes are in here?

There are in the region of 200,000 tunes at present. Owing to the fact that tunes get passed down the generations, over the seas, through pubs and across instruments, some tunes have many slightly different versions. It's normal to see a number of transcriptions of the same tune. When exact duplicates are found they are combined (there are over 400,000 tunes counting duplicates). If you see two tunes that look identical, chances are they've been notated slightly differently.

How did the tunes get into FolkTuneFinder?

There have always been people who like writing tunes down in books, on scraps of paper and recently, on the internet. Without people like this many tunes would have been lost to the ages and FolkTuneFinder could not exist. FolkTuneFinder has a web crawler that looks all over the web searching for tunes that have been transcribed in the ABC format. These are saved and indexed for you to search, exactly like Google does for documents.

How do I contribute tunes to FolkTuneFinder?

You can sign up for an account and start a FolkTuneFinder Blog. You'll need to know the ABC music transcription language. You can put tunes on your blog to share them with the world. Your tunes will automatically become part of the FolkTuneFinder search index.

If you already have a website with ABC on it and it's not already on FolkTuneFinder, get in contact!

Currently only ABC tunes are accepted. If you have a collection of tunes in another format, please get in contact anyway. It may be possible to arrange something.

How long has FolkTuneFinder been going?

FolkTuneFinder started out as an academic project. It went live in 2008 and has become unexpectedly popular in the intervening years! It has received two complete updates since then. The most recent, version 4, was released in January 2012.

The site gets over 300 unique visitors a day from all kinds of unlikely places around the world. About 2000 tunes are viewed per day.

How do I spread the word?

FolkTuneFinder has hundreds of fans on Facebook, a handful of followers on twitter and a spoonful of friends on MySpace. They all help get the word out to more people and spread the tunes around. You'll find links on the home page.

Who is responsible for this

Me.

What can FolkTuneFinder do?

Title Search

Search for a tune by typing in its title

Melody search

Search for a tune by typing in the melody in any key. You can narrow it down by time signature or key, although you don't have to know what the original key is.

Random tune

Waste hours discovering exciting new tunes. There are some real gems to be found.

Sign up (for free) and get:

Favourites

If you find a tune you like or want to come back later, click the heart under the tune and it will be added to your list of favourite tunes

FolkTuneFinder Blog

If you like transcribing or composing tunes, sign up for a FolkTuneFinder Blog. This is an easy and elegant way to publish tunes on the web with annotations if you like. You will have to know ABC (it's not hard to learn)

Profile

Share as much or as little personal information as you like with the world.

Release notes

See the Release Notes page for a history of the updates to this site.