The D smallpipe chanter is a fourth higher than the A smallpipe chanter- its bottom D is the D above middle C

Thanks Pete, that's exactly the info that I was looking for and just as I was starting to give up on it all too. It has also confirmed my suspicions that I was right to check my rather flakey technical knowledge of these things before offering any info to a 3rd party! I'll pass the gen on and hopefully we can all benefit a little from the results with a more bellows pipe friendly search facility on folktunefinder.

IMHO an equally, or perhaps more, useful filter would be for 'nine-note' tunes. Many 'pipe' tunes appear in MSS in fiddle keys [G, F even]. It would also be nice to filter by K:*mix, but a lot of abc files use the number of#'s in the KS rather than a modal description...

I like the idea of the 9 note search. I was going to suggest the mixolydian search but also had some doubts about the kind of results that would throw out. Now I'm armed with the requested information I can drop these suggestions into the hat and we can see where they go. The guy is a very able programer and also a box player so I'm quite hopeful.