At the sessions I attend, the tunes we play are pretty much limited to what melody pops into the Players minds. I think we would all agree at any given session there are bunches of great tunes not played because the tune just did not come to mind and conversely some other tunes that just get played way to often…resulting in, well.. tune fatigue 
What about this…a little pocket size book that would have the tune name as well as just the first measure to jump start the tune. The book itself could have 100 + tunes depending on the historical repertoire of that given session.
I don’t think local players here are much different than anywhere else, where someone is pulling up a tune name in their head, that they remember they like, but can’t start it, you throw out the tune name to other players and no one else can start it either, but if someone is able to start it from this first measure, then everyone or many people hop right in as that first measure jump started their playing of the tune as well. With a little book like that you could go right down the list and play a S__t load of great tunes not often played, that none the less many know. Ive noticed how happy people seem when we play a popular tune here to fore forgotten 
and really only one person would need to have the book.
That said I’m guessing this idea is not original and many may have done this already… if you have, did it work?
Ben Shaffer
If you have an iPod/iPhone and can read ABC notation, the “TradTunes” app does exactly this, but with 4000 tunes. I’ve used it at sessions exactly as you describe. Usually, I have to play the ABC real slow 'cause I can’t read it at speed, but then someone in the group remembers it. If you’re an expert ABCer, it would be superb!
TunePal has this facility as well, but you need to be connected via 3G or WiFi. I’m not a big fan of TunePal, actually. It’s supposed to recognize tunes while you play them (in addition to the look up feature), but it doesn’t seem to work consistently.
Pat
Hi
We have the exact same problem at our session so I don’t think you’re unique in that.
Someone started ‘Give Me You’re Hand’ this week, just picked at ramdom, hadn’t played it for
well over a year 
There’s maybe 3 or 4 of us who have either small books with names and first 2 measures in dots
or just stapled together bits of paper with the first 2 in ABC.
Also if you’re learning a tune you;ve got somewhere to jot some notes down.
Ben, what you’re describing is called an Incipits List, or just a cheat sheet. I use one and I know a few others who do as well. I find it useful because I have a tendency to blank out when it comes to starting tunes. It’s also handy for reviewing the tunes you know.
I wrote a series of Perl programs to process my personal ABC collection and generate Incipits Lists automatically. I can sort and filter the output by tune type, or key, or title, or whatever is convenient. I also have a scheme to “alphabetize” tunes by the first few notes so I can look up any tune. The output can be either ABC or standard notation. I can sight-read ABC easily, but notation is easier to see in a dark session setting. I can fit approximately 120 notated tune incipits on a single letter size page, both sides. So a couple of pages holds a fairly ample collection.
Unfortunately, my Perl system is not shareable since it depends on specific, consistent formatting details in my ABC collection, as well as specific tools like abcm2ps and a specific processing order and procedure. But it’s not hard to create a basic Incipits sheet manually if you’re fluent in ABC and handy with a text editor.
If you are a.Mac user you can use Barfly to produce an incipit list. Point it with four pages on a single page a you get a fairly small set of pages.with lots of tunes.
Mr. guru, I would love a look at the perl scripts…
Yeah, maybe someday. There are getopts switches on some of it, but also funky “uncomment me” and “rewrite me” code. Basically a hack I threw together for myself.
If you are like me the “rewrite me” code will be there when you die…
Put together a requirements spec, folks, and I will write the program - within reason of course. Java, multi-platform (SE rather than ME), open source. I like winter programming projects, and TWJCalc did not take as long as I expected. ABC should be a doddle to parse, the rest is all down to what you want done with the data…
Oddly I’ve just started to do something similar for myself. A little A7(approx) sized notebook in which I write down the tunes I know, the key, and the first measure or two in my own ‘numbered’ whistle tab. It’s more a memory aid for me to be able to start a tune and to practice them when I’m away from home without having to cart much stuff about. I do take it to seesions with me to write down new tunes to add to my repertoire.
DrPhill:
I was thinking about the same thing! It would be quite easy to read the file, substringing up to the 3rd vertical bar (or so), look for a blank line, repeat, and write it to another file. You could even throw away everything except the title line, or keep the header info and convert to pdf. Cool project! Actually, maybe I’ll get my students to do it - hmmmmm…
I have a huge ABC file that I gleaned from the Swedish site (hn200505 is the file) - it comes out to 896 pdf pages! It is now in my iPhone and on my Kindle.
Pat
dear Pat,
i tried downloading this thing, all the files have a .abc file extension on them; how did you get that into pdf?
cheers,
eric
Yep, the parsing sounds like ‘an exercise for the student’. The GUI to allow a user choice over the parsing/paring/outputFormat would be a little more taxing…
Some titles might need shortening - a bit of fun to be had here: remove common words (the, on, a…), maybe even remove some vowels from words (unless first in word).
Group tunes by key? By rhythm? Probably a combination in some user defined order…
Excellent student project.
Eric:
I downloaded all the individual files, cut-and-pasted them into BarFly, fixed some of the errors, and "Export"ed the result to PDF. This took me a couple of hours, all told.
Barfly (on the Mac) uses “abm2ps” to convert. Also, you need the “paid” version to do multiple files into one big document.
Pat
Dunno about Macs, but if you’re a Windoze guy there’s a bunch of programs out there that let you print to a virtual printer, automatically saving the “printout” as a PDF. I found them by googling.
Those thinking of this project: Check with Phil Taylor who wrote Barfly and has a incipit maker in his program and John Chambers who wrote one I could never get to work to create abc incipit files. Those are good starting points, and I suspect both of those folks would be willing to be helpful in some ways. I’ll beta test for anyone who gets this going for abc files. I’ve years of computer work and testing experience (and very little experience with modern languages unfortunately) and would love to help out.
thanks… 
I just wrote a little Java program that takes in an abc file and outputs the file with only the first lines (including the appropriate header stuff). I checked it and it works fine when popping into abcm2ps application.
If you want the .jar (executable), just let me know via PM and I’ll “attach” it to you via email. Nothing fancy and pure brute force, but it does seem to work OK.
Pat
Sarah, who makes the Sassy Sack whistle cases, used to sell a little book that her session uses.
It’s a handy little rascal with lots of good tunes.
Her website is here but I don’t see it listed. Maybe you could email her and see if she still has any around.
http://www.angelfire.com/mo/sassafrassgrove/WhistleRoll/main.html
Doc