Hungarian and Romanian music have much in common, at least superficially, because both are traditionally played by orchestras consisting mainly of Gipsies. Many songs and dance melodies are common between Hungary and Romania, a lot of them are of Gipsy origin. For these reasons a seperate main category for "Gipsy" music is incorporated in the database.

The bulk of Gipsy music falls in two subcategories: Gipsy dance (with a subdivision of 2/4 and 3/4 measures) and Gipsy rubato-parlando, mostly of a lament character. A forth category, "Hybrid and other", is used for all other Gipsy melodies.

The lyrics of Gipsy songs is rather loosely defined. Most songs have been developed in an improvizing mood. Often in one village other texts are used than in other villages. Often the texts of different stanzas do not fit with the score of the first stanza. To avoid complex scores with more than one stanza, we use one fixed score and notate in the lyrics attachment small deviations between in brackets: (-) means that one note is coupled to its predecessor, (syllable) means that this syllable should be inserted using an extra note.

Another problem with the lyrics is the language used. Most of the tunes in this database are in Hungarian, a few in Romanian or Gipsy language. Often Gipsies intersect a Hungarian text with Gipsy words, what makes it difficult to find a correct translation, as long as we have no Gipsy-language dictionary.

A special aspect of Gipsy lyrics is the insertion of syllables that have no intellegible meaning, for instance "de" (literally meaning but), "ha" (literally meaning if), "oszt" (no meaning), "jaj de" (here translated as ah). Another typical aspect is filling a whole line with nonsense syllables, for instance "lá di lá di ná ná náj". Of course these lines have not been translated in the lyrics attachments.