I've just discovered abc files.

I got the morris ring newsletter this morning, and it had a link to Lionel Bacon's Black book of Morris Tunes, someone has patiently been through them and encoded them as these abc files. I'd seen abc format before when I was trying to remember the "Upton-upon-Severn stick dance", which isn't in the book, and was being annoyingly elusive to my memory. I found it in abc format and could just about work it out.

The thing that excited me today (sad man that I am) is that there are programs that convert them to musical notation. There's a brilliant one for the Mac, BarFly, which comes complete with sound samples of the author's concertina, but annoyingly there don't seem to be any good ones for windows.

We have an iMac G5 and a windows PC and laptop. If the family's all in it seems a bit antisocial to be hogging the imac, and playing music from it.

They tend to banish me to a bedroom to play my oboe.
Though apparantly I'm getting better.

I've discovered that to keep my oboe in tune with John on his concertina I have to hold it up.
John sometimes kindly says "would it help to play in a different key?", which loosly translates as "you're playing horribly flat"

holding my oboe at about 45 degrees fixes it. It's not so obvious that you're playing flat when you play by yourself