Hi, again - well, I tried the Digital Tradition Folksong Player. Seems like a darn good program to me. It installed itself nicely, and it's easy to use.
You do have to have the Digital Tradition tunes file (tune.zip) unzipped. What I would do is make a digitrad tunes subdirectory in the directory where the DT tune player is located. Copy the tune.zip file into that subdirectory, and unzip it into the umpteen jillion song files Dick has typed for us (leave the original of the tune.zip file where it was, for use with the database).
Then you open the player, and go to the file menu and open a file. It produces a nifty-looking piece of sheet music, and plays the tune quite nicely. It also will enter chords into the music if you ask it to; or it will play the song with an accompaniment. Can't say I liked the accompaniment on most songs I tried, although it did a nice job on "After the Ball." Let's say, maybe, that the accompaniment is not quite what you'd expect for a folk song. The "Black Fly Song" with a samba beat didn't quite inspire me....
The main problem I see is that the program taxes my system to its limits. I have a Pentium 133 with 32 MB of memory, and the program takes forever to display a song and then longer to get around to playing it. I'll betcha it would work just fine with a Pentium 266 with 64 MB - but I'm trying to hold off and not buy another computer until Windows 2000 comes around.
-Joe Offer-