Getting Started

Welcome to the Traditional Tunes Archive.

This site is a Wiki, a website that allows users to collaboratively edit it. If you've not used a wiki before, you may want to have a look at the What are Wikis, and Why Should You Use Them? and Wikipedia Wiki pages.

More specifically, this site is powered by the Mediawiki software (used on Wikipedia, the Traditional Tune Archive and many other sites). The rendering of ABC Music Notation into a visible score is provided by the ABC Javascript (abcjs) package, without which this site would not be possible.

To add or modify content on a wiki, you Edit the relevant page. If it does not exist, it will be created, otherwise you can view and modify the current content. On this site, most pages contain details of a traditional tune, using ABC Music Notation, entered into the correct place in the supplied page template. Hence you don't really need to know much about the wiki markup used in these pages, as you can just copy and paste in some abc code. If you do want to know more about the markup though, have a look at Lawrie's guide to Getting Started Editing Wiki Pages. There are other links on the Help:Contents page.

If you want to explore how some abc notation will be rendered using the abcjs package, have a play with our ABC Sandbox.

Enjoy!