Hi Naemanson, this is an excellent question which should be part of The Mudcat FAQ. I'll give you my answer, but I'll have to add the URL's in a later thread.

(1) The very best place to start is in the collection of 4000 or so tunes which are part of the on-line Digital Tradition search. This is covered very well in the FAQ's.

(2) If you suspect that the tune/song comes from the more popular genres such as rock/pop, country, classical, jazz a good place to look for a MIDI file of the music is the Midi Explorer search engine. http://www.aitech.ac.jp/~ckelly/midi/help/midi-search.html

(3) For folkie dance tunes there's a huge collection available from JC's tune finder (available from Mudcat Links). The tunes are in ABC format, but converting them to a playable tune or printed score is not too hard.

(4) Lots of Mudcatters have a collection of folk music in printed form or have them stored away in their heads. These talented people can then create an electronic music file (say a MIDI file) and post it to Mudcat MIDI's so that we can all enjoy them.

(5) Failing the above there are lots of other resources available, some on the Web, others in large public collections of published music. There are a number of Mudcatters who are expert ferrets in finding this sort of stuff.

Hope that this helps. Regards, John