User:Piupianissimo

Free public domain sheet music from IMSLP / Petrucci Music Library

The IMSLP Star is hereby presented to you for your extraordinarily high quality scans!

Hi everybody. My Name is Matthias K. and I'm from Germany. I really like the idea of scanning old public domain scores to offer them to other musicians, so they can print the scores and play the music themselves without having to search for expensive sheet music.

For me there are two major bennefits for this site:
1. the sometimes very old sheets get preserved in digital form
2. this is a place where one can find scores that are maybe no longer sold in printed form anywhere
So in my oppinion the goal of this site should be to become a collection of a big number of scores but also a collection of printable and usable scores. Therefor I want to invite everybody who own these scores to make the best possible scans in order to give others the chance to make use of them later on. Say, don't just count the number but also the usability and quality.
Why not spend some money to buy an old music sheet of ten pages and spend some hours to scan it carefully and contribute to this cummunity.

I just bought some of these old sheets and started to scan them at 600 dpi and try to take care that there is no dust and to avoid skew. The scores I upload here do sometimes already exist on IMSLP, but the quality I found can be drastically enhanced. So in time I can hopefully place some scores of Grieg, Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin and Schumann Piano music here.

Scans

Processed scans from hansenkd

hansenkd and I work together on a project of scanning the complete Brahms songs for low voice published by C.F.Peters. That means complete the work on Book 1 you can find on top of this page.

Processed scans from third party

You can find quite a lot of scanned scores in the internet. Some of them are in low quality (e.g. low resolution). With the aproach of resizing them to 600dpi with a good algorithm I think I could reach appropriate results.
Some scans are in color and can be converted to higher resolution monocrome with nearly no visible loss in quality.
I used IrfanView for Image Conversion. This image software can be used in batch mode, so big numbers of files can be converted automaticly.

This is how I worked the Liszt scans from BSB:
The original scans are in color jpg format, thou they are not really color but monocrome already. Thus the rescaled quality is not comparable to real 600dpi scans. With a scale factor of 366% (both horizontaly and vertically) the resulting images of the Liszt scans get approximately a resolution of 600dpi. Finaly I cleaned the scans from the BSB logo an dust and dirt pixels manually what takes about 2 to 5 minutes for each page.

How to make good Scans

I believe everybody has their own idea and experiences about that.
To speak of my experiences everything starts with a clean scanner surface. You don't want to scan the dirt on your scanner, do you? Then you should find out about the best parameters of your scanner to get a good result. For example I scan with 1200 dpi and calculate the pages down to 600 dpi after scanning and I adjusted the brightness to a higher level. Be carefull with the brightness. If it is to low you might get to much dirt on your scans, if it's to high you might loose the black information (e.g. part of the notes).
Adjust the sheet you want to scan carefully on the scanner
After taking the scans I use to clean them manually from dust and perhaps pencil remarks of the original sheets. This might take a while.
Next comes the sizing of the scans. Here you should also take the time to bring the pages to the original size and to have the correct borders.
Last use some software to put all your pages into a pdf file, and done.

My conclusion is, that you should always take enough time to get good results. Don't try to scan hundreds of pages each day. It might take 15 to 30 minutes to get a good page. And in my oppinion it is better to get less quantity with better quality. We are a huge community here, so if everybody of us just spends a couple of hours each month we should get enough sheets that are all usefull.
Have a look at my scans and judge yourself. I will welcome every critics. High Quality Scanning