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Companies like Peters that do sell good accurate scores of Bach are so behind the times they literally cannot see the forest because the trees are still being cut down. It is entirely possible for them to distribute decent editions for sale in e-pub and the technology to put scores on e-ink could be made usable with essentially e-reader technology that is score sized instead of pocket book. I would gladly pay for a decent music e-ink reader that would work on my music stand. The information age is slogging along and eventually the real potential of digital music notation will happen. But unfortunately we still have those who have their heads up their assets in the music publishing industry.

Werner was a stickler for accurate notation and much of what is there on the historic digital archive, especially the Bach section, is very accurate. Unfortunately since his death others have corrupted what he started and some of the archive is not good or even accurate notation, however most of the Bach is excellent and done by people who understand the importance of accuracy in music notation. Many of the scores adhere to original source where ever possible. Which can be very difficult as in the time of the great champions of Bach's music during the late classical era much of Bach's sheet music had fallen into oblivion.

For instance a friend of Felix Mendelssohn actually found music scores by Bach being used by a butcher to wrap meats! So the digitizing for all time of all our great heritage of written music is as important as project Gutenberg. Werner understood this as many others do and either the existing music publishing houses will get on board or they will be a footnote in the history of written music.

Digitizing music has been going on for quite some time--the best of the apps is PhotoScore:

Neuratron PhotoScore

You can find tons of public domain music at the Werner Icking Music Archive, save the PDFs, and open the PDFs in PhotoScore. You can then open them in Sibelius or another music editing application.

Also check out the Icking Archive http://icking-music-archive.org/index.php which has many many many scores (I believe about 16k). Main difference with Mutopia is that they do not necessarily come with sources. V.

Since IMSLP is down, I haven't been able to see how big their collection was or what it was like, but it sounds like it was scans of PD sheet music. While that could be very useful, it's obviously preferable to have your music in a format such as lilypond that you can edit. For example, I'm a violist, and right now I'm working on the prelude from one of the Bach cello suites. Once the score was in lilypond format, it was trivial to transpose it up an octave and put it in C clef. Then I was able to change the bowings and fingerings and get high-quality printed output. The Mutopia project collects scores in lilypond format. Werner Icking Music Archive has a lot of very high quality scores in musixtex format. I've posted some of my own PD scores here. Sure it's a lot more work than collecting scans, but in the long run it's the right way to go. I think the main barrier has been the lack of open-source music typesetting software that is a gui but can produce output as high in quality as lilypond ot musixtex can. Rosegarden (a gui that uses lilypond as a back end for typesetting) wasn't quite there the last time I looked, although it seems like the developers are working hard on it.

You also have to be careful about what sheet music you are using. There are projects that distribute properly free sheet music:
http://www.mutopiaproject.org/
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:The_Sheet_ Music_Project
http://www.cpdl.org/
http://www.imslp.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://icking-music-archive.org/

http://icking-music-archive.org/

hth

The only sane thing you could do is get out your favourite paint program (not score program, they probably copyright the output of it) and draw your own score,

If you want to typeset a score and avoid having the software place restrictions on the output, there is no need to resort to the pain of using a paint program! Just use some software like MusiXTeX.

As a matter of fact, it appears that some people have already been doing this and making available some free sheet music. They have an archive, and it seems to have lots of stuff in it. For example, just look at what they have for J.S. Bach. (As soon as my printer finishes, I'm about to go annoy my neighbors with some Prelude and Fugue in D minor.)

The only sane thing you could do is get out your favourite paint program (not score program, they probably copyright the output of it) and draw your own score,

If you want to typeset a score and avoid having the software place restrictions on the output, there is no need to resort to the pain of using a paint program! Just use some software like MusiXTeX.

As a matter of fact, it appears that some people have already been doing this and making available some free sheet music. They have an archive, and it seems to have lots of stuff in it. For example, just look at what they have for J.S. Bach. (As soon as my printer finishes, I'm about to go annoy my neighbors with some Prelude and Fugue in D minor.)

The largest collection of sheet music I have seen on the Internet is the Werner Icking Music Archive, at http://icking-music-archive.org/. http://imslp.org/ also has a decent collection, as well as Mutopia, which has been previously linked.

Public domain notated music is being subverted by these a$$holes!

There are a wide variety of these programs. I use NoteEdit. It was very hard for me to install it on my SuSE 9 machine, but it works well. Make sure you have TiMidity server, which is used for playback, installed and running or else NoteEdit will crash as soon as you start it, giving a cryptic error message. Sometimes running TiMidity will interfere with other sounds on my box, which is annoying, so I have to turn it on and off. If you want to print music you've inputed to NoteEdit, you need LaTeX installed. Remember, the commands to convert a LaTeX file to a musical score are:

$ latex filename.tex
$ musixflx filename.tex
$ latex filename.tex

I got this wrong for a while, even with the VERY noticable reminder from NoteEdit.

One of the other programs available is Rose Garden. Rose Garden is more mature but also less intuitive and oriented towards synthesis as opposed to performances.

If you get to be hard-core about editing scores on your Linux box, the best program around for professional score engraving will already be installed on your computer with the LaTeX distribution you aquired for printing the output from NoteEdit. See this Giant Musixtex Manual. I often typeset complex mathematics, but I have not yet been able to master musixtex, so good luck there.

I've used Rosegarden to enter a few pieces of music, and it's pretty good. I tend to focus more on tweaking the output to look exactly the way I want, and Rosegarden's output to Lilypond needed a fair bit of tweaking. Well, rewriting. :-)

There's probably a chance that Rosegarden's export to MUP or PMX or (various other options) works better. I've only recently started using Lilypond (after using MusixTeX for a while), so I'm probably not doing things in the most efficient way.

As mentioned by the AC, NoteEdit looks like a pretty good option too, though I haven't tried it myself. Hmmm... (reading features)... maybe I should. :)

The best places to get sheet music for free are The Choral Public Domain Library, the Mutopia Project, Gutenberg Music, the Sheet Music Archive, and the Werner Icking Music Archive. And while we're at it, the best way to engrave (typeset) music is with Lilypond.

You just aren't looking hard enough, my friend.Here's a source with plenty of Bach music.

When you purchase classic sheet music what you are really paying for is the actual printing and distribution process. That's why classical music is generally so much less expensive than copyrighted works. You can purchase classical sheet music from a wide array of vendors, and that keeps the price down. Printing still costs money though. Unless, of course, you download the PDF (or TeX source!) and print your own copy.

No. Have you heard Bach's last fugue? Then you wouldn't make that claim. You'll find a score here, look at bar 201, pg 97