Indices for jazz real / fake books

This repository is intended to be a high quality, collaboratively edited collection of indices for well known jazz real / fake books, rooted in the belief that Open Data is often the most beneficial approach.

If you spot any mistakes or want to contribute a new index, you are extremely welcome to do so right now!

How to use these indices

Assuming you have a PDF of a real / fake book whose contents are described by one of these indices:

You can split the large PDF into many small PDF files, one per song, using my PDFexploder tool.
Use Birdland Musician's Assistant which is a Linux-based multimedia music viewer and library manager for music books in PDF form including fakebooks.
Use https://github.com/neshanjo/fakebook-splitter which is based on NodeJS and pdftk so should work with Windows/Mac/Linux.
Use https://codeberg.org/strk/splitPDF which is very fast and broadly compatible ( https://perl-begin.org/platforms/ )
You can use this utility for Windows which provides a GUI for quickly searching the indices and jumping to the right page in the PDF.
forScore 10 for iPad adds a feature that allows you to add indexes to large scores by uploading a CSV file that links the song titles to specific page numbers of the PDF.

If you know of any other ways to use them, please submit the details via a new issue , or even better, via a pull request as described immediately below.

How to contribute

The format of these index files is extremely simple to understand, so anyone should be able to make contributions - it's the very well-known CSV (or Comma-Separated Values) format, which can be edited via countless pieces of software. The easiest way by far is editing directly on this website (github).

If you really want to edit or build new indices offline, two of the most obvious choices are LibreOffice and Microsoft Excel. But the format is so simple that it's just as easy to use a text editor.

Once your contributions are ready, you will have to send a pull request which requires learning a bit about git, so unless you're particularly computer savvy, I'd recommend sticking with the online approach.

File format

Each line in an index file contains:

the name of a tune
the number of the first page of the tune within the PDF file
(optional) the number of the last page of the tune within the PDF file

For example:

Stormy Weather,452,453

means that the tune Stormy Weather starts on page 452 and finishes on the next page.

The final page number is optional, because it can often be automatically inferred by the starting page of the next tune, and this makes indices a lot easier to type, edit, and read. For example, here the first tune can be assumed to be only one page long, i.e. finishing on page 391:

Seven Come Eleven,391,
Seven Steps To Heaven,392,

Sometimes a tune will actually bleed over onto a page on which another tune starts, in which case its final page can be manually specified to eliminate the chance of the computer guessing wrong.

Note that these page numbers refer to the number of the page in the PDF, not the number you will see printed at one of the corners of the page! They are usually different because the numbering in the original books does not simply start at 1 and increase in a perfect sequence due to the presence of cover pages, prefaces, indices, appendices etc. which are usually excluded from the printed numbering.

As you can see, the three values are separated by commas. If the name of the tune contains a comma, then you must surround the whole tune name with double quotes, e.g.

"Night In Tunisia, A",20,

(This repository adopts the standard that tunes whose name begins with "A" or "The" should place the definite or indefinite article at the end of the name, after a comma, in order to facilitate a more useful alphabetical sorting order.)

If the tune itself already contains double quotes, then you must also double those double quotes:

"Take The ""A"" Train",434,

Even though this is not part of the CSV standard, it is also permitted to add blank lines and comment lines, which begin with the # symbol. However in order to avoid breaking GitHub's file editor, it's necessary to ensure that comment lines have the same number of commas as the other lines, and to avoid incompatibiliity with the CSV format by ensuring that if the first field of a commented line is quoted, the # symbol must go inside the quotes, not outside. So these are valid comments:

# All Of Me,18,
"# All Of Me",18,

but this is not:

# "All Of Me",18,

Finally, UNIX line endings are used, rather than MS-DOS / Windows-style CR/LF line endings.

Alternative sources of indices

Legal stuff

Music book indices by Adam Spiers is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

I am not a lawyer, but I understand that there is a slim chance that these indices could be argued to be derivative works of copyrighted material. If so, they are distributed under fair use, since:

the distribution is not for profit,
the distribution cannot negatively impact the expected revenue from or market for the original works (in fact if anything it should increase it),
the indices substantially less than the original work, and
considerable original effort was invested in creating accurate indices.

aspiers/book-indices