The two volumes of this collection were edited by James Manson and published by W. Hamilton in Edinburgh in 1846. They are organized in the HUTB1 and HUTB2 subdirectories. Many of the tunes here are currently well-known, though sometimes under different titles. A few of the tunes here differ significantly from current versions. Many qualify as an "interesting variant" that musicians might like to learn.

This directory contains only the combined files for each of the two (known) volumes in the collection, with names HUTBn-yyyy-Vv.abc, where the fields are:

HUTB	means Hamilton's Universal Tune-Book.
n	is the book's volume number (1 or 2).
yyyy	is the year of publication (1844 or 1846).
Vv	is the ABC version, V1 for ABC 1.7 and V2 for ABC 2.1.

The titles in this collection are mostly upper case, though a few contain some words in lower case (mostly in parentheses). On change made in the transcriptions is that initial articles of titles in file names and in the single-tune files are put in lower case, which some sorting software interprets as insignificant words to be ignored. However, in the large files for the entire books, the initial articles are capitalized, for the benefit of software that gets confused by initial lower-case letters. So use whichever makes your software the happiest.

Most of the music in this collection should work with most ABC software. But there are a few tunes that use notation like crescendo/diminuendo symbols, two voices on one staff, trailing grace notes, and other things that weren't in early (1.*) versions of ABC. If a tune is present in both versions, you should check which your software prefers. But for most of the tunes, it won't make any difference, and the V1 versions are compatible with more ABC software than the V2 versions.

There are PDF images of the original books in the src subdirectory.