The following definitions describe some of the file formats used on this web site. These definitions are provided for your convenience and are not intended to be an official technical resource.

Please refer to the suggested links for more information.

• ABC - A scripting language designed to notate music in an ASCII format. It was designed primarily for folk and traditional tunes of Western European origin (such as English, Irish and Scottish) which can be written on one stave in standard classical notation. However, it is extendible to many other types of music such as that for the chemnitzer. Since its introduction in 1991, ABC has become very popular and there now exist several PC and UNIX based tools which can read ABC notation and either process it into staff notation or play it through the speakers of a computer. For more information please see The ABC Home Page or the ABC Notation entry on Wikipedia.org. You may also find the ABC Convert-A-Matic from Concertina.net a useful tool.

• GIF - Pronounced jiff or giff (hard g) stands for graphics interchange format, a bit-mapped graphics file format. This standard for graphics file compression was developed by CompuServe. For more information please see the GIF entry on Wikipedia.org.

• MIDI - An acronym for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. These files store information in a form called a MIDI message, which encodes aspects of sound such as pitch and volume as 8-bit bytes of digital information. For more information please see the MIDI entry on Wikipedia.org.

• MP3 - MP3 is another name for a layer-3 MPEG ('Moving Pictures Experts Group') date file. It is a sound compression format that can create near CD-quality sound files while maintaining a small file size. For more information please see the MP3 entry on Wikipedia.org.