theStarport / Steve_Savitzky / Songs / (index)

Filksongs by Steve Savitzky

This directory contains filksongs by Steve Savitzky [bio] [fanish home page]. If you don't know what filk music is, you need to look at interesting.places.to/Browse/forMusic.

Songs:

Song Index

Tabular index. Best viewed in a browser that supports tables and displays longish lines. Includes short file names, links to printable PDF files (with chords), HTML, Ogg Vorbis audio files if present, and approximate timings.

Song List

List of songs. Suitable for use with all browsers. Probably the best thing for use with a handheld or text-to-speech program. Optimized for lynx.

Albums:

This copy of the song directory is part of a CD/CDROM called About Bleeding Time; it's a bonus for people who preorder Coffee, Computers and Song!

Licensing:

Memorials:

Keep the Dream Alive [ogg]

was originally written in 1986 for the Challenger. It has (unfortunately) recently been updated, and a new verse added, for the Columbia.

     If you need comic relief and have a high tolerance for black humor, check out Thrill-Seekers' Waltz, and don't say you weren't warned. If you want to record Keep the Dream Alive you can send the royalties to a space-related charity instead of to me. Just drop me a note.

The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of [ogg]

was written for my late father. He went to grad school with Isaac Asimov, and introduced me to both computers and science fiction.

 

For Amy [ogg]

was written for my stillborn daughter Amethyst Rose.

Prize-winning songs:

The World Inside the Crystal [ogg]

1997 Pegasus Award winner: Best Science Song.
Kathy Mar's performance on mp3.com is gone, along with the rest of the former mp3.com. (But here's a nice, fresh, and far too big .ogg for you.) A preliminary rough dump from the album currently in progress is here.

 

Vampire Megabyte [ogg]

2001 Kazoo Award: ``user unfriendly computer filk'' at ConChord 2001.
2001 Pegasus Nominee: best computer song.

Notes:

HTML Formatting:

Since the HTML is automatically generated by a rather stupid PERL script, don't expect the world's best typesetting. In particular, the spacing between verses is horribly inconsistent. This will eventually improve. For an example of what's possible, see the PDF files.

Audio Files:

We use the free, open Ogg Vorbis format -- it provides noticably better sound than MP3 and is unencumbered by patent restrictions. It's supported by most PC media players and some "mp3"-players. If you don't have one, here's a list of free player software. You might have good luck with jlGui, which is written in Java and so has a decent chance of running almost anywhere.

Editing:

For some reason, many people like to play their oggs with Audacity, an excellent cross-platform, open-source sound recording and editing program. I just use it for recording and editing. Being cross-platform it's great for collaboration, and it also makes short work of splitting a concert recording or ripped cassette tape into song files.

     For text editing, I use GNU Emacs. In the past Emacs has been derided for being bloated and slow, but back then 1MB was a lot of memory, and 1MHz was a blazingly fast CPU clock. These days, it's about a tenth the size of the popular Firefox web browser (which, like Emacs, is mostly written in an interpreted language), and I don't hear many people complaining about it.

Printing:

Note that the indices no longer have links to postscript files, which were eliminated due to space considerations (they took up about 5 Mb at a time when I only had an allowance of 35). If you really want a printed songbook, send me a note at <steve+filk at theStarport.org> and if I get pestered enough I'll think about publishing one. They do have links to PDF's, which are pretty repulsive but easier for most folks to handle than .dvi's.

Tools

Setlist Maker

A simple CGI for constructing and displaying concert set lists. Not on the website at the moment because all the operations were done using query strings in links, rather then forms. This created an astronomical number of virtual pages, causing the various search engines to gobble up most of my bandwidth. One of the few places where I really need to use Javascript.

../TeX/

The FlkTeX markup language, including the tools used to generate the .html files in this directory, and to produce the indices. FlkTeX is based on LaTeX, which in turn is a set of macros for Don Knuth's TeX typesetting system. TeX is basically an expert system for typesetting, and produces professional-quality output with very little effort and practically no manual tweaking.

Coming Soon

Sheet music

I'm a lousy transcriber, so doing this right will probably require a voice-to-MIDI translator. Anyone have one that runs on Linux?

``Source Code'' in FlkTeX/.

This is easy to put up, and would let people make typeset versions of the songs in the privacy of their own home directories.