Real-Finder

Live Site: here

About

The Real Book is a collection of lead sheets (music with the melody and chords) for various classic jazz tunes (like Autumn Leaves and Misty).

The Real Finder is a tool for searching, browsing, and building setlists from these hundreds of songs. Currently the third, fifth, and sixth editions are indexed, more to come soon.

Some pop-leaning standards (e.g. Billy Joel's Just The Way You Are) appear only in the 2nd edition, which isn't indexed yet. Try therealbook.info in the meantime.

Features

• Search and fuzzy-find songs across indexed editions
• Open song PDFs directly from search results
• Build and persist personal setlists
• /legacy.html — a no-build, no-framework version for direct use

Tech

Frontend: Vite, Vue.js, Tailwind, Fuse.js

Data Wrangling: PaddlePaddle, PyMuPDF, rapidfuzz, pandas

Pages

Route	Description
/	Search homepage; includes PDF download links for 3rd, 5th, and 6th editions
/Setlist/Personal	Your current setlist
/Setlist/Example	An example setlist
/index/{3|5|6}	Browse all songs in a specific edition
/legacy.html	Legacy search page (no Vue)

OCR Pipeline

To index a new edition:

1. Run /utility_notebooks/General_OCR_Pipeline.ipynb on the raw PDF of the new edition
2. Paste the output into a TSV and do minimal cleaning (fix OCR errors, etc.).
3. Run /utility_notebooks/PDF_Splitting.ipynb using the page number outputs
4. Run /utility_notebooks/JRB_Metadata_Joining.ipynb to link found songs to an existing database of Jazz Standard chord changes (found here, thanks to mikeoliphant for compiling). It also merges songs listed under different names (e.g. Girl From Ipanema, The → The Girl From Ipanema).
   • I'd recommend persisting change logs somewhere, like I've done in src/data/log_of_manual_edits.txt. These can be helpful when rerunning the pipeline for a future edition.
5. Run /utility_notebooks/metadata2keyed.ipynb to pre-index for the page view table

Roadmap

I'm pretty happy with this project for my usecase (quickly pulling up tunes on my iPad), but if I were to continue it, here are the most likely next steps:

• Index additional editions
• Search by composer, feel, key, or genre
• A "progression finder" - see what standards have a Imaj7 -> III#5 -> IVmaj7 progression for instance (like Some Day My Prince Will Come)
• A "noodle saver" - jot down ideas in ABC notation and come back to them later