This version of the O'Neill's Collection has been edited and rearranged in response to a number of (most Irish fiddle teachers') suggestions that the original O'Neill's Project files are difficult to use due to being organized primarly by tune number. Also, there has been growing use of small, portable electronic gadgets for displaying music at "sessions" and other musical events. Most of the tunes here have 2 or more versions that are formatted differently to fit well on screens of different shapes. This is only partly successful, due to the the great variety in screen shapes and resolution. The best way, really, is to download the .abc tunes and feed them to your own formatting software. A good place to look for software is at abcnotation.com, which lists a lot of (mostly free) software, and find software that best fits your needs. But it's hoped that the variety of layouts here will help somewhat, as a way of presenting the entire collection if a fashion that's a lot more useful than a one-size-fits-all format that previous distributions have followed. Also, anyone seriously considering learning many of the O'Neils' tunes should get copies of their books. Look at melbay.com for a start.
Each tune has been transcribed in a separate file, and put in directories named for the sections of the book (air, jig, hornpipe, reel, etc.). The file-name convention here is Tune_Title-K-B-S.abc, where Tune_Title is the T: header with spaces replaced by underscores, other punctuation (mostly apostrophes) omitted. K is the tune's key, B is the bar-count (including repeats), and S is the staff count. There are many cases where a tune has several files that differ mostly in the S count, and sometimes in the B or K values. There are multiple versions of most tunes, and other fields may be added to the file names to distinguish them.
O'Neill mostly used entirely upper-case for titles, but I've used the "Title Caps" convention instead. The O'Neill Project transcribers were inconsistent about this. Initial articles (The, A, An) are omitted in the file names, and were converted to lower-case in the file's T: header. (This has been suggested as the most useful approach in computer files, to discourage such titles being alphabetized under 'T' or 'A', which has been an ongoing problem for centuries.)
There are sometimes other fields in the file name just after the Tune-Title. For many tunes, O'Neill has multiple "settings" that are different versions of the same tune. The book mostly labels them as "1st Setting", "2nd Setting", etc., so the "1st" and "2nd" has been included in the file name.
There are a number of cases of several different tunes with the same name, and for them, the tune's X: index number has been included in the title. See "Morning Star" and "House in the Glen" for examples. With time, I've found this to be convenient for several reasons, and eventually all the tunes here may have their index number in the file name, just after the title.
This collection also contains many tunes that are formatted in more than one manner. This includes different staff breaks, and there are also many that have been "compacted" (to fit better on small screens) by replacing written-out repeats of 4-bar phrases with the initial identical bars plus two endings. These have file names that have a single digit after the Tune-Title. "1" has been used to indicate the version from the book, with "2" (and sometimes "3") to indicate a compact version, with one or more instances of repeats with multiple endings. (Some tunes don't have "1" in the tune/file name, while others do; this is experimental. The version number "1" are slowly being dropped, with "2" and "3" in the file name and "#2 or "#3" added to the T: line indicating the compacted versions.)
Note that with phrases with multiple endings, the ABC [1 and [2 tokens sometimes occur inside a measure, not just at bar lines. Some people prefer that endings ony include whole measures, but this isn't required by any musical standard, and others prefer seeing things like pickup notes included in a "phrase". It's especially common to see repeat marks start at the middle of a measure. All of these multi-endings schemes have been used here to "compact" the music, to maximize what will fit on small screens.
A curious special case can be found in O'Neill's book, in which endings start at a bar line, and the "note" just before the first ending looks like a 2-note "chord" that combines the pickup notes for both endings. These notes should be included in the bracketed endings, but have been written before the endings for some reason, and you just have to figure out which note belongs with which ending. See tunes 800 (Merry Old Woman) or 902 (Rakes of Clonmel) for examples of this notation. I've used this in several other tunes to make them a bit more compact, since O'Neill seems to have approved of it. But when it's not obvious which note goes with which ending, I've included the pickup notes in the endings. Both of these alternative "endings" syntax schemes may be upsetting to people who think endings should consist of complete measures. Sorry, but neither I nor much of the music printing industry agree with that, and many music teachers strongly prefer pickup notes be visibly attached to their phrase rather than to the ending of the previous phrase.
One thing that causes problems for ABC software is the inconsistent use of repeat symbols. All of the following are found the O'Neill's books, where "..." represents several bars of music:
... :| ... :| ... :|: ... :| ... :|: ... ||Any of these may have initial |: repeats, but this is rare. The bar lines may be thick or thin. Some of these produce warnings or fatal errors in ABC "player" software that doesn't understand what was intended. These have mostly been transcribed as:
|: ... :: ... :| or: |: ... :| |: ... :|
The O'Neills used a format that had a clef on only the first staff of a tune, and single or double bar lines at the left of the rest of the staffs. This pattern has mostly been preserved here, though of course ABC doesn't really have "clefs", and conversion software will usually use whatever convention the programmer(s) preferred. Most ABC conversion tools today put a clef at the start of each staff. This can make the note spacing in the first staff noticably different from the other staffs. Some tunes have the staff breaks adjusted to give more even note spacing. But this conflicts with the desire to have a staff break at the start of a phrase when convenient. Both approaches have been followed here at times.
In any case, repeats should generally be considered optional, and you should repeat phrases however seems appropriate to you. If you're playing for dancing, pick a repeat pattern that fits the dance.