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there's a similar issue actually with sheet music--most of the good sheet music for those same pieces is under some degree of copyright control. i wonder if anyone's looking at doing the same thing there? you could transcribe whole swaths of the canon to MusicXML or ABC and release them under CC-SA or GFDL pretty cheaply, i'd think.

There is a very large collection of scans of existing pieces at the International Music Score Library Project. The Mutopia Project has a relatively small collection of scores, but theirs are typeset using Lilypond with source freely available.

It seems a little backwards, though. Lilypond may be hard to use, but it's very powerful and produces gorgeous scores - and all the variations are on Mutopia already.

- All the tablet screen sizes are too small - 10.1" max. Letter is equivalent to 13.9", A4 equivalent to 14.3", and the Henle Urtext pages are equivalent to 15.3". Yes the edges of the pages are blank, but they're still substantially larger than any tablet.

I use an ipad for piano sheet music (Stanza has a beautiful interface to free music scores). Cropping out the margins with Goodreader helps tremendously.

- They're too low resolution. The iPad looks like it would work, but 1024x768 is simply inadequate for any complex scores. It turns many of the details of an intricate Chopin or Listz score into a blurry mess. e-ink should have the advantage here, if it didn't take so long to turn pages.

Granted, I'm not playing unbelievably complex music, but classical pieces are often available from Mutopia and can be re-typeset to a smaller page size.

Your point about eink is hogwash: they are not high resolution screens. In tricky lighting situations an ipad is much nicer. This is coming from a Kindle owner. Eink can be deceiving about its resolution for two reasons: there are no tiny spaces between "pixels", and the fonts are highly optimized for the exact screen configuration. This eliminates antialiasing and the fuzziness you perceive. It does not help at all for music scores.

- AFAIK almost nobody is truly digitizing music. They're just scanning old sheet music into PDFs. The music score publishers are deathly afraid of going digital because they figure everyone will just copy all the scores instead of buying it from them. They've been milking the "change a few fonts and publish a new version with a new copyright" workaround to copyright expiration for centuries. So all that's left are independent musicians to take the time and effort to convert an out-of-copyright score into something like a .mus (Finale) file or MuseScore or LilyPond.

See Mutopia. This is better for piano players than others, but it is the Project Gutenberg of the music world. As for more modern music, you're stuck with scanned PDF. Of course, if you know you're going to do that, you can try to find music in a relatively small page form factor suitable for viewing on a 10" portrait screen with cropped margins.

I beg to differ. It doesn't take much effort to find Lilypond versions: http://www.google.com/search?q=goldberg%20variations%20filetype%3Aly leads quickly to this set of scores with copies here and here, all of which provide the score as Lilypond files, as well as PDFs and MIDI.

So it seems worth asking again: what is the new thing that this project is bringing to the table?

Contrary to TFA, there are CC licensed scores in Lilypond format available through Mutopia. As far as PDF scans and such, as other posters have mentioned, there are innumerable resources.

The big questions for me (disclaimer: I'm a professional classical pianist) is that of scholarly review. The go-to publisher for Bach today is Bärenreiter/Neue Bach Ausgabe, and by and large, any edition of Bach that I use that isn't Bärenreiter should ideally be cross referenced with it. Of course, it is very expensive to purchase, but it is one item that any university with a music program simply must have in its library. What concerns me is that TFA simply is vague who or what they mean by scholarly review, and this alone would prevent me from considering it over current alternatives.

IMHO the value in the project will be a (hopefully) excellent recording that is CC licensed, as there doesn't appear to be any decent recordings of the sort (through a cursory search), unless you include Wanda Landowska's eccentric harpsichord recordings from 1945. Genius is already easily available in recordings on piano by Gould (both 1955 and 1981), Schiff, Hewitt, Barenboim, Perahia, and Leonhardt on harpsichord.

Also try the Mutopia Project, which has user-contributed sheet music in Lilypond format. Ready-to-print PDF output, as well as computer-generated MIDI format previews of the music, are also available on the site. (The last time I tried to mirror its music files resulted in a 1.4 GB file dump. It had some Bach, although I'm not sure if the Goldberg Variations was among them.)

I was kind of surprised that iBooks wasn't showing as highly rated as I thought. For me that is the killer app.

Check out the Stanza ebook reader. It offers a really nice interface to even more collections of free books. If you play an instrument, it also has built-in access to Mutopia, which is really nice.

if you can use a universal assembler to obtain any object you want, what motivation is there to do labor?

Exactly - it's just like with software.. when coders don't get paid, they don't have any motivation to write software!

Oh, crap.

OK then, it's just like writing music. If music writers didn't get paid, there would be no motivation to make music.

Umm.. ignore that

Well, then it's like writing. If authors didn't get paid, they'd have no motivation to write stories.

Oh, sec..

Hmm.. maybe the motivation to do "labour" will come from enjoyment - it will be done by people who enjoy doing it, rather than those who are only in it for the money?

Someone should point these schools to sites like mutopia, imslp, and for choirs, the choir public domain library.

Lilypond scores are, of course, welcome, but the Mutopia Project ( http://www.mutopiaproject.org/ ) is a much better resource.

Can somebody explain the difference between IMSLP and Mutopia ( http://www.mutopiaproject.org/ )?

SZERVÃC Attila

Here are some resources for you:

• Creative Commons Search
• Jamendo - CC music distributed via BitTorrent and eMule
• My own piano music - you could really help me out if you shared it on the Internet
• The Mutopia Project - CC and public domain sheet music

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.

Try the Mutopia Project - all their sheet music is out of copyright in both the USA and the EU.

Not that this lessens the tragedy of a site having to shut down due to baseless threats which would cost too much to defend against.

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/

By the way, if you want to help with such an effort, you should download a piece, convert to lilypond, and then upload to Mutopiaproject.org

http://www.mutopiaproject.org/

Lots of public domain pdfs out there.

Before anyone gets too excited -- there are plenty of public-domain editions of Mozart. This is just one particular edition that's going to be available online for free. There's actually a huge amount of PD sheed music available at Mutopia. The nice thing about the Mutopia stuff is that it's in a format that's editable using free software (Lilypond). For instance, I've taken some Mozart horn duets and arranged them so my daughter and I can play them on violin and viola. Because it's in Lilypond format, it's easy to transpose, arrange, whatever. If all you want is digital scans of PD editions, there are various sites that will let you download scans for free. One thing that seems a little goofy about the NMA thing is that they make you agree to use this web site only for personal study and not to make copies except for my personal use under "Fair Use" principles of Copyright law as defined in this license agreement. Uh ... fair use is an exception to copyright. Hell, I can copy a Britney Spears CD and call it fair use.

• several public domain music sites share this interpretation, presumably after doing their legal homework. See the Mutopia Project's page about legal issues, and a similar page at CPDL. Since it is in these sites' interest to distribute, the fact that they share this interpretation does not bode well for a more liberal reading.
• As a musician, every modern score I have come across (including modern scores of early music, of which I perform a lot) will have a Copyright (C) the year it was published. So the publishers are at least attempting to assert this right. Some editions (like the New Novello Choral Edition of the Messiah) also include notes specifically forbidding even public performance of the music from the edition without payment. I always find this extremely offensive.
• There are some unarguably creative things that go into editing music -- for example, deciding what the real note is when the original manuscripts only have a smudge, reconciling differences between different manuscripts, etc -- and there will often be significant scholarship that goes into resolving these issues. Almost every edition I have encountered (even of music as recent as the 20th century) includes scholarly work like that, which would probably make a judge sympathetic to the idea that the printing is copyrightable.

theres always the lilypond music...
http://www.mutopiaproject.org/

Well, plugging "trumpet public domain" into Google gets me a page of trumpet pieces from the mutopia project, but the thing is the most prolific authors of trumpet pieces were not renaissance - and the later ones are, by most people, considered far more grandiose. I would instead recommend you visit a conservatorium library to find what you want.

Cheers,

Michael

Lilypond and Mutopia should keep him busy for a while...

Doesn't have everything, yet...
http://www.mutopiaproject.org/ Has quite a few public domain transcriptions of classical music. In many file formats to boot, eh!

I've found some goodies at the Mutopia Project. This website has many out-of-copyright pieces that have been typeset by volunteers and uploaded for all to use. Music is available in PDF, MIDI, and LilyPond (an open-source Finale-ish format).

All music in the Mutopia Project is free to download, print out, perform and distribute. There are now 756 pieces of music available!

example, i buy a beethoven cd, can i then copy and pass it around? not according to them.. ...as there is copyright in sound _recordings_ seperate from the copyright in the music as composed by the composer - although, amazingly, only since 1972 in the United States.

A better example would be sheet music, where there is indeed a concerted effort by publishers to keep works by long-dead composers in copyright by creating new editions and in some cases refusing to sell but only renting the music.

Yet I have no doubt that this will eventually happen. PG already has a section devoted to sheet music. The tools are beginning to appear : lilypond [lilypond.org] is a superb Free music engraving software package. I'm personnally working on music OCR software, and others are as well I'm sure. Eventually this will work out well I think. think.

How about Project Gutenberg?

Over the years, Project Gutenberg will become insignificant. High school literature teachers already require students to read specific books that are copyrighted and aren't provided as part of the school's textbook rental program. For instance, a lot of curricula require the student to read the copyrighted novel The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald. As the mainstream media recognize more recent novels as "classics of twentieth century literature", this situation will expand; students will be expected to read more post-1923 books in addition to pre-1923 books.

How about just leveraging the vast store of knowledge that others, more dedicated than you, have made available, for free, without DRM, online, as it currently exists?

So do you believe that, say, a music appreciation course should stop abruptly at 1922, where the Mutopia and Gutenberg Music stop due to copyright term extension?

"It is fascinating to see how these companies 'help themselves' to copyright-protected material, build up their own business models around what they have collected, and parasitically, earn advertising revenue off the back of other people's content,"

Parasitically? Symbiotically! User profiling for Google, traffic and sales for publishers. I'm happy to have Google index my publications!

Have a look at my publications of classical guitar sheet music. Yes, small scale and non-profit publishing are also publishing!

The divide is widening between consumer friendly content and consumer hostile content. Commons oriented versus fenced-off content. Without the big content guys molding copyright rules to their will, the result would be obvious. Count in rule bending, and we're in for an exciting match!

You can re-enter the music in Lilypond's format and then use Lilypond to convert the score to a MIDI file for playback.
And if he does that (and the original edition he's working from is public domain), he might want to submit it to Mutopia. And in fact, before he does that, he might want to check whether the piece he's learning is already on Mutopia. However, for choral music, CPDL seems to be the place that has the most music; unfortunately, they use a proprietary format (Finale).

• http://www.mutopiaproject.org/
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Sound (Check bottom)
• Internet Archive: Open Source Audio
• Free Classical Music Archive recordings performed by the MIT choir and other amateurs (quite high quality)
• The Choral Public Domain Library describes itself as 'A Free Sheet Music Archive'
• Mutopia: a collection of public domain sheet music
• Project Gutenberg music section
• MusicBrainz: a database of structured metadata about audio releases

The first thing to be understood is that Creative Commons has several licenses that it encourages content creators to use. In addition to the noncommercial license the Dvorak has reviewed, there are licenses available that permit commercial use, with attribution, with varying permissions for derived works. I use the "attribution-share alike" license, which is similar in its goals to the GPL but differs in its details.

The second thing to understand is that the licenses the Creative Commons provides are international in scope. Fair use rights and the nature of copyright varies considerably from place to place, and fair use rights in the United States are stronger than those in many other places. The nature of copyright also varies, with some jurisdictions refusing to recognize public domain materials or having a much lower bar for minimum creative effort required to obtain copyright. This has created problems with the mutopia project, which requires international copyright clearance because it has mirrors worldwide. The Creative Commons "public domain license" addresses these issues.

Like any standardized license, the adoption of a standard license text minimizes the problems for aggregation and reuse that can occur when various entities try to develop their own open source licenses, as has happened with so many software projects. Musicians and writers would do well to recognize this and adopt the Creative Commons licenses rather than making their own.

Dvorak places great faith in being able to obtain permissions for copyrighted works he wishes to reuse. That's fairly straightforward for a blog article that's a year old, but is almost impossible for older material still in copyright. I've tried. Often the original copyright holder can't be located, or the copyright has passed to heirs or other successors who aren't interested in relicensing or who want unreasonable fees. I don't want that to happen to creative works that I create. Fifty years from now, if someone else is working on a sheet music project, I want them to be able to use the material I have created as a starting point, regardless of what my heirs or attorneys think.

Finally, the Creative Commons has addressed many of the shortcomings of the GFDL that the FSF has refused to grapple with, among them the requirement for including the 8-page long license text with every copy or derivative work (a problem for someone who wants to reuse a photo for a postcard, for example), and the overly restrictive DRM limitations.

Dvorak's article is short on facts and long on opinions that appear not to be informed by the needs of content creators who are out there today making open-source content using digital media of all kinds.

Lilypond 2.4.1 fails completely on several Mutopia files including chopin-op-25-01.ly and also Lilypond itself doesn't compile without a lot of tweaking. Do you have a bug tracker? I couldn't see any mention of one on Lilypond - Development - Participate.webpage

Here's the error for that .ly file:

error: Error found in this music expression. Ignoring it
Backtrace:
In unknown file:
?: 0* [lilypond-main ("chopin-op-25-01.ly")]
In /usr/local/share/lilypond/2.4.1/scm/lily.scm:
596: 1* (let* ((failed #) (handler #)) (for-each (lambda # #) files) ...)
598: 2* [for-each # ("chopin-op-25-01.ly")]
In /usr/share/guile/1.6/srfi/srfi-1.scm:
661: 3 (if (null? rest) (letrec ((lp #)) (lp list1)) ...) ...
665: 4 (begin (f (car l)) (lp (cdr l)))
666: 5* [# "chopin-op-25-01.ly"]
In /usr/local/share/lilypond/2.4.1/scm/lily.scm:
600: 6 [catch ly-file-failed # #]
In unknown file:
?: 7* [#]
In /usr/local/share/lilypond/2.4.1/scm/lily.scm:
600: 8* [ly:parse-file "chopin-op-25-01.ly"]
In chopin-op-25-01.ly:
205: 9* (paper-set-staff-size (* 6 mm))

chopin-op-25-01.ly:205:26: In expression (paper-set-staff-size (* 6 mm)):
chopin-op-25-01.ly:205:26: Unbound variable: paper-set-staff-size

Here's the error for compiling 2.4.1
rm -f ./out/volta-engraver.dep; DEPENDENCIES_OUTPUT="./out/volta-engraver.dep ./out/volta-engraver.o" g++ -c -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -DSTRING_UTILS_INLINED -Iinclude -I./out -I../flower/include -I../flower/./out -I../flower/include -O2 -finline-functions -g -pipe -I/usr/share/texmf/include/ -I/usr/include/python2.3 -O2 -finline-functions -g -pipe -I/usr/share/texmf/include/ -I/usr/include/python2.3 -W -Wall -Wconversion -o out/volta-engraver.o volta-engraver.cc
flex -Cfe -p -p -oout/lexer.cc lexer.ll
"lexer.ll", line 638: warning, -s option given but default rule can be matched
rm -f ./out/lexer.dep; DEPENDENCIES_OUTPUT="./out/lexer.dep ./out/lexer.o" g++ -c -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -DSTRING_UTILS_INLINED -Iinclude -I./out -I../flower/include -I../flower/./out -I../flower/include -O2 -finline-functions -g -pipe -I/usr/share/texmf/include/ -I/usr/include/python2.3 -O2 -finline-functions -g -pipe -I/usr/share/texmf/include/ -I/usr/include/python2.3 -W -Wall -Wconversion -o out/lexer.o out/lexer.cc
out/lexer.cc:3457: warning: 'yy_start_stack_ptr' defined but not used
out/lexer.cc:3458: warning: 'yy_start_stack_depth' defined but not used
out/lexer.cc:3459: warning: 'yy_start_stack' defined but not used
out/lexer.cc:3461: warning: 'void yy_push_state(int)' declared `static' but never defined
out/lexer.cc:3464: warning: 'void yy_pop_state()' declared `static' but never defined
out/lexer.cc:3467: warning: 'int yy_top_state()' declared `static' but never defined
bison -o out/parser.cc parser.yy
mv -f parser.yy.tab.c out/parser.cc # bison 1.30
mv: cannot stat `parser.yy.tab.c': No such file or directory
make[1]: [out/parser.cc] Error 1 (ignored)
rm -f ./out/parser.dep; DEPENDENCIES_OUTPUT="./out/parser.dep ./out/parser.o" g++ -c -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -DSTRING_UTILS_INLINED -Iinclude -I./out -I../flower/include -I../flower/./out -I../flower/include -O2 -finline-functions -g -pipe -I/usr/share/texmf/include/ -I/usr/include/python2.3 -O2 -finline-functions -g -pipe -I/usr/share/texmf/include/ -I/usr/include/python2.3 -W -Wall -Wconversion -o out/parser.o out/parser.cc
out/parser.cc: In function `int yyparse(void*)':
out/parser.cc:5540: error: expected primary-expression before "__attribute__"
out/parser.cc:5540: error: expected `

Lilypond is great, although it's still in a state of rapid change. I hope one day they make the project stable enough that, e.g., people can depend on the Lilypond language not to keep on breaking compatibility. It's created a real problem for the Mutopia, for instance. But the bottom line is that Lilypond does let you produce professional-quality sheet music, and there isn't any other OSS that can do that. Pretty amazing accomplishment for a team consisting mainly of a couple of hobbyists.

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.

See the Mutopia project (Canadian server, American mirror from IBiblio). They provide public domain and BSD-style licensed musical scores in GNU LilyPond format, and have PDFs and MIDIs of the score rendered for download. Many classical music pieces are available there, and the PDFs make for nice printouts.

It's not quite a song, as in a recording (any recordings from before the PD date probably haven't survived), but it's still public domain music.

I foresee a world where SVG is dominant and regular pixel based images are seen as WAV files as in comparison to MIDI.

Except residential casual copyright infringers no longer trade MIDI or MOD files anymore. Most now trade .mp3 (MPEG audio) or .ogg (Ogg Vorbis audio) files on P2P networks.

Imagine how many songs you could fit on a CD if it were midi, with human voice parameters.

By "human voice parameters" do you mean a recording of Britney's actual voice compressed with Speex or some other wideband CELP codec? Otherwise, "human voice parameters" will never sound exactly like Britney Spears. And since when has the quality of real-time digital synthesis improved to such that substituting MIDI for the recorded performance of a full orchestra to satisfy an audiophile?

Ignoring the vocals, you'd get thousands of songs on a CD.

"Ignoring the vocals" means ignoring the vast majority of the music played on commercial FM radio today. Besides, "thousands of songs on a CD" would make CDs more expensive, as the label would have to pay extra royalties to the songwriters(' publishers). Sure, Mutopia would be able to pack a sound font and a thousand .ly.gz files onto an affordable CD, but Mutopia is an isolated case.

SVG also fixes the pixelation issue

The future of digital imaging among residential users lies in photos and video. Digital cameras output photos made of pixels. What the heck kind of autotrace are you imagining for resizing a photo? Manual trace takes work; a typical residential user just wants to blow up a photo and print it or blow up video to fit on a 32" TV.

You can see their howto pages to see it in action. You probably want to check out some sample outputs. And this project also uses LilyPond. Check that out.

The gutenberg project of music does exist, it's called The Mutopia Project and it's available from http://www.mutopiaproject.org.

Somebody shuold mention the Mutopia Project here, and I gues I'm the guy to do it.

They have been at it a while converting old editions and manuscripts. Help 'em out if ya can!

They've currently got 387 pieces of music going, and they're adding more and more quicker and quicker.

Check out the Mutopia Project for scores of classical music that are in the public domain.

I do agree that it is kind of wacky for prints of music to be copyrighted in the same way the music itself is, but it can't be helped with the screwed up system that is copyright unless we let congress know we wish for it to be reformed.

So, is there a Project Gutenberg for music? I can find sheet music on Mutopia, but where are the public domain recordings? The Recording Academy has a preservation project to preserve all kinds of recorded music, but no word on whether they plan to make the public domain works available. The RA turned over part of its materials to the US Library of Congress, which does maintain a collection of recordings, but again there is no clear provision for obtaining public domain recordings for pleasure. There is a system for obtaining certain recordings online or as a copy, for academic or research purposes. So, where is our our public domain recorded music archive?

The ongoing case against the retroactive extension of copyright duration is also very important to many people, including The Mutopia Project. Though of course, which cases are most important depends on your point of view.

Two spring immediately to mind:

http://www.mutopiaproject.org and http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/music.

Sheet music? Have you tried The Mutopia Project?

the score is not copyrighted, you can rearrange it as you see fit, as you can with any music over 65 years old as in my understanding (IANAL). The performances ARE copyrighted, now if you want to spend a few hundred thousand dollars paying for your favorite orchestra to rehearse/record your favorite classical songs, so be it. The music is free the performance is not.

I understand all that... I believe I noted that in my original query. And, indeed, perhaps I should have mentioned that I am aware of the Mutopia Project which uses GNU Lilypond to put classic scores online. But I was hoping that there might be some repository of performances of classical music in digital format which had been made freely available.

I really don't expect to find much in the way of the Cleveland Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony, or other orchestras with big-ticket CDs. But this world has a wealth of good quality small-name orchestra, including some of the better University orchestras. I wouldn't be surprised if some of those were willing to release recordings of their concerts for free. (I mean, heck, sometimes the performances are free to the public.)

-Rob

I am in this situation right now. My domain at NetSol is expiring early August, so I decided to transfer it to register.com. After I paid $35 transfer fee, I received an e-mail from NetSol asking me to authorize the transfer. I did authorize it, but just a few days ago register.com sent me an e-mail that NetSol denied my transfer request.

That's happened to me, too. Some time before the expiry date of mutopiaproject.org, I attempted to transfer it to Register.com, only to have Network Solutions send me an email several days later, declining the transfer on the grounds that the account was not in a paid state. After three transatlantic phone calls, I resigned myself to having to sign up with Network Solutions for another year, and I paid by credit card through their website. Some time later, I received an email from them saying that the credit card transaction had been declined. I had to make yet another transatlantic phone call, during which I was told that "We've been having problems with credit cards being declined in the last few days, we'll put it though again ThankYouForCallingVerisign".

Separately from this, I've had quite a lot of problems with their "Mail-From" and "Crypt-PW" authentication systems, which seem to only work part of the time. Basically, whenever you change the details of your domain name, they send you a confirmation email, and you have to reply with the appropriate text depending on which authentication system you use. I had a period of about a week where neither system seemed to be working, though I tried repeatedly, and then suddenly I did the same thing for the 10th time and it just worked.

My advice to anyone who wants to register a domain name is this: don't touch Network Solutions with a barge poll; go to a different registrar, e.g. register.com.

Aaah, too bad Mutopia doesn't have Strauss... You could have posted it as a Lilypond file or something =)

Along the same lines of Project Gutenberg, but for music, is Mutopia.