7 ms·
Petrucci Music Library
- whatscooking 3y agoWhat is this? Nobody knows about IMSLP? Web site has been around since the dawn of time
- pgeorgi 3y agohttps://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
- bjoli 3y agoI am a professional musician. I use IMSLP all the time. When I practise I use an iPad to store upcoming projects. A lot of the music we play is available there, so instead of scanning the music manually I just download it from IMSLP, with score and everything. Together with openstreetmap it is my favourite project of all time.
- sigil 3y agoI play from printed IMSLP scores, but I’ve never gotten good at page turns. What app do you use?
- whatscooking 3y agoBuy a pedal page turner for ipad
- Bud 3y agoThe app of choice for professional musicians is ForScore, and there's really no competition. https://forscore.co/ https://forscore.co/ 100% of my colleagues are using ForScore on an iPad for these purposes. Great feature set, great support, stable, very fast. And page-turning is ultra-fast. If you need that to be hands-free, there are numerous hardware options for that.
- analog31 3y agoMy kids are both music students. Each of them has an iPad and a page turning pedal. Don't know why the adjacent comment was downvoted, but they use ForScore. The music students go through an incredible amount of sheet music, and it's cumbersome to print it out and carry it around. At their recitals, I typically see about 1/2 the kids with iPads, the other 1/2 with paper. It's always Apple, possibly due to the "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" effect, but to be fair the Apple devices do work pretty well. You can also just reach out and flick the page on the touch screen, not as elegant but more predictable than flipping a printed page -- at least your sheets won't go flying. Managing page turns does get easier with experience, and you learn to prepare your charts -- taping them together, dog-earing them so you can quickly grab a corner, sometimes cutting things apart and rearranging so a page turn happens at a convenient location such as a couple measures of rest. I'm a jazz musician, and have a Windows tablet, that was a hand-me-down. It only has a 10" screen, making conventional music notation hard to read. It's OK for reading chord symbols. I also have a notebook PC with 14" touch screen, that can operate in tablet mode, so I can lay it open on my music stand. That's a lot more readable, and has full blown computer functionality if I need it, but of course there's the danger of the stand tipping over. Admittedly I still prefer paper, for one thing it's a lot easier to annotate with a pencil, quickly.
- kashunstva 3y agoI’m a collaborative pianist by profession (an ‘accompanist’). I use the forScore app as do the vast majority of my colleagues who play from an iPad. The annotation, cataloguing and metadata tools are superb.
- bjoli 3y agoWe got an iPad with pedal turners and ForScore at work. It works Ok. Make sure to try the turners though. Some are bad.
- tgv 3y agoFor Android: MobileSheets.
- Jolter 3y agoMobileSheets Pro for android is pretty nice. It’s not as polished in the UX department as ForScore, but it works really well and IMO it handles complex page sequences better than ForScore. In typical Android fashion, it exposes a bit too much functionality so it can be overwhelming to a new user.
- perihelions 3y agoI love this site so much. I've been spending the last few weeks downloading public-domain scores and carefully curating them onto my tablet (awesome tools for PDF reading, if not much else). I've been learning command-line pdf tools so that I can curate/annotate music cores in interesting ways, or append ToC's, or create research versions from multiple editions of the same piece. My current project (literally this minute) is reducing thousands of pages of Scarlatti into the curated subset that's Vladimir Horowitz' repertoire. As soon as I finish, I'll listen to his album again, with all the scores in one place :)
- pinerd3 3y agoCan you recommend any command-line pdf tools? As a student I have to look at lots of pdfs and the gui tools for manipulation are very lacking.
- perihelions 3y agoI used pdftk for this project, https://manpages.debian.org/bullseye/pdftk-java/pdftk.1.en.html#Join https://manpages.debian.org/bullseye/pdftk-java/pdftk.1.en.h... I only used the subcommands "cat" (extract & concatenate PDF pages) and "update_info" (to edit ToC metadata).
- joshspankit 3y agoThat sounds like a significant and helpful addition to those scores. Have you tried contacting the Library to see if they could host the changes so they are available for others? Alternatively maybe even github depending on the legality
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoWhat I'd love to do is use OCR on a bunch of these and be able to freely use the pieces by rendering them with MIDI. There are pieces I want to use in my short films or whatever, but all the recordings are copyrighted even if the music is now public-domain.
- mappu 3y agoA lot goes into a specific recorded performance, I think it's unrealistic to expect a film-worthy performance out of a MIDI renderer.
- bandika 3y agoUnrealistic is an understatement, to be honest...
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoSure, but for little indie projects I think it would suffice. And there are some great string libraries out there.
- dharma1 3y agoWould sound pretty boring OCRd but I wonder if a trained ML model could do a decent job of score -> expressive midi (2.0) performance
- sporkl 3y agoMusic OCR is in general in a pretty terrible state these days (I’ve tried most of the options on the market). I’ve heard good things about soundslice[1] though, but I haven’t had the occasion to try it yet. [1]: https://www.soundslice.com/sheet-music-scanner/ https://www.soundslice.com/sheet-music-scanner/
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoThanks, but ugh: It's Web-based.
- 3y ago
- tdumitrescu 3y agoTake from a musicologist and semi-professional performer: IMSLP is great for finding quick scores of random stuff, but the editions are often pretty shoddy, like either super outdated with weird editorial decisions that no one's agreed with for the last 50 years, or someone's totally amateur transcription full of errors and equally weird decisions. Treat it like you might treat Wikipedia as a research source (ok as an initial point of entry, but soon you want to dig into the real sources).
- Eduard 3y ago> IMSLP is great for finding quick scores of random stuff, but the editions are often pretty shoddy, like either super outdated with weird editorial decisions that no one's agreed with for the last 50 years, or someone's totally amateur transcription full of errors and equally weird decisions. You picked my interest. - what makes an "edition" ("score"?) outdated? - can you give examples for a weird editorial decision, maybe by additionally providing an alternative good editorial version? - what happened that something deemed correct (?) over 50 years ago is nowadays something no one agrees with?
- rdiddly 3y agoI don't presume to know what they meant, but as an example of something I think fits the bill, I downloaded "Bill Bailey Won't You Please Come Home" and the lyrics are full of a certain type of phonetic transliteration from vernacular Afro-American English (as if it's a foreign language or something) the likes of which you would probably never see today (e.g. lots of "dat" and "dey" and "throw'd" and "de whole day" and so on).
- InCityDreams 3y agoI'd love to know if there was a whole class of people that actually did speak in "derogatory caricature".
- dmitrij 3y agoIn the last decades philological standards for reproducing the original form of a musical work taking into account historical musical traditions, composing and performance practices have become much more thorough. Editions from the 19th and early 20th century which you can find on IMSLP because they are out of copyright restrictions often don't meet these scholarly standards. They very often reflect performance practises and the style of their time. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urtext_edition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urtext_edition.
- ThinkingGuy 3y agoAs one of the 10000 who's hearing about IMSLP for the first time, how is this different from what's available on Musopen? https://musopen.org/sheetmusic/ https://musopen.org/sheetmusic/
- ternaryoperator 3y agoFar, far greater selection. Also, within a given work, there are multiple scores published at different times, so you can see the editing from multiple perspectives. For example, different fingering suggestions on piano pieces, etc.
- nemetroid 3y agoIt looks like Musopen, at least partially, created their sheet music archive by scraping IMSLP. I picked a somewhat well-known (but not too well-known) composer (Wilhelm Stenhammar) and selected three works at random. In each case, Musopen's file is the same as the topmost file on IMSLP. https://musopen.org/music/22022-violin-sonata-op19/ https://musopen.org/music/22022-violin-sonata-op19/ https://musopen.org/music/22020-symphony-no2-op34/ https://musopen.org/music/22020-symphony-no2-op34/ https://musopen.org/music/22021-turandot-op42/ https://musopen.org/music/22021-turandot-op42/ https://imslp.org/wiki/Violin_Sonata%2C_Op.19_(Stenhammar%2C_Wilhelm) https://imslp.org/wiki/Violin_Sonata%2C_Op.19_(Stenhammar%2C... https://imslp.org/wiki/Symphony_No.2%2C_Op.34_(Stenhammar%2C_Wilhelm) https://imslp.org/wiki/Symphony_No.2%2C_Op.34_(Stenhammar%2C... https://imslp.org/wiki/Turandot%2C_Op.42_(Stenhammar%2C_Wilhelm) https://imslp.org/wiki/Turandot%2C_Op.42_(Stenhammar%2C_Wilh...
- dang 3y agoRelated: The Petrucci Music Library - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22752114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22752114 - April 2020 (21 comments)
- ragar90 3y agofirst comment solved my doubt, is not related to Jhon Petrucci
- mlajtos 3y agoIndeed, this is not related to Dream Theater’s John Petrucci.
- reincoder 3y agoHonor thy father started to play in my head as soon as read the title. Here is the Portnoy's angle version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_L4WassMWQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_L4WassMWQ
- cozzyd 3y agoYeah I was trying to find an about page on the site to try to find out...
- jancsika 3y agoOoh, they have the manuscript for Rhapsody in Blue, which is in public domain. :) https://imslp.org/wiki/Rhapsody_in_Blue_(Gershwin%2C_George) https://imslp.org/wiki/Rhapsody_in_Blue_(Gershwin%2C_George) Ha-- he's got a single grand staff for "jazz band" and just names the instruments inline. Judging by the historical recordings, that included an extra piano for the jazz pianist to noodle around on, which is kind of funny to see on stage. Sometimes people will throw in a banjo, too. Also-- if you've ever had the experience of trying to remember a song and singing things in your head in the wrong order-- so did George Gershwin! You can see where he crossed out a small piano solo excerpt and then wrote it back in after a little interlude with piano and French horn. I.e., "oops, that's supposed to come later," or perhaps, "hm, this section needs to be longer, let me insert a little thingy with a drone in l.h. and French horn inner line. Yeah, that's good..." Near the beginning he appears to have initially considered a hacky little Lisztian rising chromatic scale that alternates with a repeated octave in the bass. That apparently was supposed to lead the band playing the main theme, very soon after they already played it. He crossed out the entire thing and replaced it with an echo of the little syncopated mumble, followed by an imitation of the opening clarinet scale. Then he has a more elegant re-harmonization (changing the chords) of the main theme and a little subtle interplay between piano and jazz band. This is followed by a fairly long cadenza, and then he finally brings the jazz band back in with a full statement of the theme. You can literally see the signs of him throwing out a simple song form with a short solo break and turning it into a more substantial through-composed form. Almost like he got stuck, went and listened to (or played) Tchaikovsky's Piano Concert No. 1, then came back and finished the piece! Apparently, Gershwin actually improvised on top of what's written here for the debut. IIRC Marcus Roberts did the same in a live performance some years back. I'm impressed by anyone who can do that live; however, he didn't really stay in the Gershwin style for his cadenzas. Gershwin's improvisations are these idiosyncratic little polyrhythmic automatons, drawing heavily on stride style as well as popular syncopated and dance rhythms of his era. And in Rhapsody you'd have to fit that in with the classical-style arabesques. It's got to be something like musical "method acting" to be able to pull this off. And bonus points if the improviser can throw in some subtle R&B or rap references in the improvisations. :)
- jancsika 3y agoWow, 53 seconds to render a random page of that PDF in Firefox! Chrome-- takes 10 seconds to even load the PDF reader. While it appears to have loaded most of the pages after that time, the entire window becomes laggy by about 1 second or so for any event-- scroll, page down, etc. (Didn't even dare to zoom...) Native Gnome whatever PDF reader-- anywhere from 5 to 25 second load time for each page. (After that, that particular page responds immediately to scrolling.)
- haberman 3y agoA choral variant of this: https://cpdl.org/ https://cpdl.org/
- Doctor_Fegg 3y agoWeird licence though - it’s a rewrite of the GPL which they call “public domain”. In addition the site is more clunky and the community less welcoming. I just use IMSLP for my choral music uploads and encourage others to do the same.
- moultano 3y agoAlso check out https://www.mutopiaproject.org/ https://www.mutopiaproject.org/ which is working on producing latex versions of music using lilypond.
- mod50ack 3y agoFYI, LilyPond hasn't been TeX-based in many years, though they still share some design principles.
- laerios 3y ago> working on producing The Mutopia project is dormant (per admissions and observations from contributors in the project's mailing list), and under current maintainership (or lack thereof) having contributions processed is hit-or-miss[0]. > latex versions of music Lilypond is not based on (La)TeX, but lilypond-book, a companion utility that processes lilypond files, allows scores (or fragments) to be integrated into LaTeX, DocBook, Texinfo, and HTML documents[1]. (There is a LaTeX package for music typesetting called MusiXTeX[2], which was used by many scores of the former Werner Icking Music Archive, which merged[3] long ago into IMSLP). 0: Primary contribution channel: https://github.com/MutopiaProject/MutopiaProject https://github.com/MutopiaProject/MutopiaProject 1: Usage of lilypond-book: https://lilypond.org/doc/v2.23/Documentation/usage/integrating-music-and-text https://lilypond.org/doc/v2.23/Documentation/usage/integrati... 2: MusiXTeX package home page: https://ctan.org/pkg/musixtex?lang=en https://ctan.org/pkg/musixtex?lang=en 3: WIMA: https://www.icking-music-archive.org/index.php https://www.icking-music-archive.org/index.php
- admiralkirk 3y agoAs an early music specialist (Baroque, plucked strings), it should be noted that for performers like us who prefer to read from primary sources, having original manuscripts from the Baroque and Renaissance periods available on IMSLP has revolutionized our field. It is only going to get better in the future, as more people upload the scans of music manuscripts held across the various libraries around the world. If you prefer to study and perform from primary sources, as we do, IMSLP is an excellent place to start your research.
- necubi 3y agoDo you read directly from the manuscripts, or do you transcribe them into more legible formats for playing? As a violinist I find historical handwritten manuscripts incredibly hard to sightread compared to modern engraving, but I'm curious if that's something you can get good at with practice.
- reikonomusha 3y agoI find that it's useful to have a "clean" score (urtext if possible), but also have the primary source available for cross-referencing if you want to really know what the composer penned. A study of the primary score is often useful in tandem with an edition. Some composers had very neat handwriting!
- tsm 3y agoI specialize in 18th-century Scottish music and generally find that the hand-engraved copperplate printing from the 18th-century produces more readable music than modern editions. I also play stuff like Corelli sonatas (easy to read) from facsimiles and Playford tunes (17th century, woodblock printing) from facsimiles. The Playford is fine for me, but I'd understand it if people wanted to transcribe it. I used to play with a Renaissance group that played ca. 1500 music (published by Petrucci himself!) and they transcribed it into urtexts, which I appreciated. Two big factors in that were a) using more comfortable clefs b) turning something written in parts into a score. It's helpful to see what the harmonic situation is, and playing off a score makes that much easier.
- benkitzelman 3y ago... do they have guitar tab and chord sheets lol. Oh I can imagine the replies to this already lol.
- progrus 3y agoHonestly, this sounds like a great idea. Project Gutenberg for tabs in the public domain.
- topaz0 3y agohttps://imslp.org/wiki/Category:For_guitar https://imslp.org/wiki/Category:For_guitar
- rdtennent 3y agomost renaissance and baroque works for plucked instruments (lutes, baroque guitars) were originally notated in tablature and such scores can certainly be found at IMSLP. If you think "guitar tabs" are a recent invention you're quite wrong.
- vrglvrglvrgl 3y ago[dead]
- loeg 3y agoI'm a total amateur / recreational musician and have found IMSLP useful for finding music to play. Happy to see it getting some attention here.
- mrblampo 3y agoThis was invaluable in music school.
- noobcoder 3y agoI have some things you can do with it for people who are getting into it newly: - Find sheet music for a wide variety of composers and genres, from Bach to Bartok. - Info about composers, including biographies, bibliographies, and discographies. - Info about musical works, including instrumentation, duration, and historical background. - A discussion forum They also post updates on their blogs on whats new Also you can access it through an API as well
- chillbill 3y agoThe amount of pushing they do on the iOS app to get you to subscribe is obnoxious. Instantly made me delete it, incredibly aggravating.
- CrampusDestrus 3y agoI really really REALLY dislike that they use Google as an internal search engine. It's hideous to use and navigate since it also opens a new tab and basically prohibits you from using the site in any normal fashion if you don't like being tracked and using Google
- tgv 3y agoStarting your query with imslp (e.g. "imslp bwv 663", no exclamation mark) in DDG usually gives the right result.
- hestefisk 3y agoIs this John Petrucci, the guitarist of Dream Theater?
- lenwood 3y agoI wondered the same, but apparently not. Excerpt from their About page[1]. > IMSLP, also known as the International Music Score Library Project or Petrucci Music Library, was started in 2006. The logo on the main page is a capital letter A. It was taken from the beginning of the very first printed book of music, the Harmonice Musices Odhecaton. It was published in Venice in 1501 by Ottaviano Petrucci, the library's namesake. [1] https://imslp.org/wiki/IMSLP:About https://imslp.org/wiki/IMSLP:About
- otikik 3y agoNice, it has Catch Potato on it! https://imslp.org/wiki/File:PMLP1079721-catch_potato_1.pdf https://imslp.org/wiki/File:PMLP1079721-catch_potato_1.pdf
- j7ake 3y agoIMSLP is the killer app for iPad. Instant sheet music at the touch a button.