Kind Words

Wow. Amazing site and congratulations on your work.

– E-mail to me from Alph Duggan, of Ennis, Co. Clare, sent on 5 June 2008.

I wish I could hire you to organize my life like you've organized the tunes! :-) [. . .] Your page is one of my favorite models for beautiful simplicity in organizing so much information.

– E-mail to me from Lia Zito of Anchorage, Alaska, sent on 12 February 2008.

An excellent site with a lot of thought put in. Well done, and I shall be telling a lot of people about it!!!!

– E-mail to me from Catherine McEvoy, of Co. Meath, Ireland, sent on 1 January 2008.

Date:         Sun, 1 Oct 2006 11:51:29 -0500
Sender:       Irish Traditional Music List
From:         "Smith, Christopher"
Subject:      another public thank-you to Alan for irishtunes.info

Alan:

I'd been aware, as a result of passing comments made by other list-members over the past few weeks, that you'd added a tune ID/incipit function to irishtunes, but today was the first day I've had the chance to pay a return visit. What an incredible, invaluable function! Now one can search for recordings of the tune (as one should), without the bottleneck/crutch of full notation, but at the same time have the confidence that the tune and title are correctly married with one another, via the incipit. Your use of database technology to further not only the archiving but also the *currency* of tunes is absolutely brilliant. I say this as someone who's been on usenet since and on Irtrad since around 1996, and has observed the proliferation of online tune-collections (and their abuse) for nearly as long: I think irishtunes.info just might be one of the most important visually-based tools for the Music since O Neill's.

Thank you.

chris smith

an encyclopedic source of information on tunes, albums, tunebooks, etc.

– Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann Sean O’Riada Branch, published on their page <http://www.albanycce.com/favorite.htm>. Appeared there at least by 10 October 2006.

[. . .] exemplary online database indexing recordings of tunes. An invaluable resource for learning.

– Chris Smith, published on his page <http://coyotebanjo.com/links.html>. Appeared there at least by 14 February 2006, according to web.archive.org.

Everything you wanted to know about a tune: different names, who recorded it, what and who else is on the album, identify tunes on a recording, document a tune's history, find out if there's a composer, locate transcriptions in books. An amazing web site. thanks, Alan!

– David James, published on his page <http://www.tiompanalley.com/index_files/LINKS.htm>. Appeared there at some point after Mar. 12, 2005, according to web.archive.org, and before 26 November 2006, when I found it.

It's an amazingly detailed and complete index of traditional tunes, cross-referenced with recordings.

– Baxter, in a posting on 28 January 2005 at <whistletutor.com>

an amazing database of traditional tune sources

– Navan, published on their page <http://www.navan.org/links.html>. Appeared there at some point between 6 June 2004 and 23 July 2004 according to web.archive.org.

Alan Ng's Tunography, irishtune.info, the Irish Traditional Music Tune Index, by whatever name you call it, you won't do it justice -- this is a simply amazing concordance of Irish music on record overflowing with all sorts of tidbits on the playing, history and culture of Irish music. I now know the difference between a barn-dance, a slide and a single reel ... and why so many tunes are called Gan Ainm! (it means "title unknown")

Scholarly, detailed beyond belief, comprehensive and exact, Alan Ng has cataloged thousands of recordings, cross-referencing songs, correcting mis-edited song-lists, and taking no one's word for the identity of any tune until he's heard it for himself. [. . .]

If you need to find a tune with only the barest fragment of even an obscure name for it, or if you're looking for recorded examples, this is your first best stop to shop.

– Gary Lawrence Murphy, published 26 April 2004 on his blog at <http://irish.teledyn.com/node/30>.