Categorizing free printable sheet music:
1)Scanned and 2)Musical



  • Scanned free printable sheet music will almost always be significantly bigger (bigger file sizes) than non-scanned Musical based formats irrespective of whether the sheet music is contained in a PDF or other data format.
  • It is easier to create scanned sheet music than to create sheet music in a musical format.
  • To create al piece of scanned sheet music, a person would only need to take a printed sheet music and scan it.
  • To create a musical format, the user would need to transcribe a printed piece of sheet music into a musical notation program in order to produce a piece of free printable sheet music.

Ocarina Music

It seems natural to categorize free printable sheet music formats into two types:

  1. Non-Proprietary
  2. Proprietary

Proprietary formats are the way that music notation sofware stores its data for its own use, primarily intended for that specific software program to use. Let me illustrate, the Noteworty Composer musical notation software stores its data in ".nwc" files (files ending in ".nwc"). ".nwc" files are intended for use with Noteworty Composer. This does not mean that other programs cannot read/write ".nwc" files. The emphasis is that ".nwc" files are INTENDED to be used by Noteworthy Composer, thus I would categorize .nwc as proprietary.

Non-proprietary formats are designed to be easily used by different musical notation software. A simple non-prorietary format is ABC. In the ABC musical format "Hot Cross Buns" would look something like this:

T:Hot Cross Buns
M:4/4
K:C
BAG2|BAG2|GGGG|AAAA|BAG2||

Note: ABC is stored as ACII (character data, the english alphabet/numbers) and can be read relatively easily by humans. If the ABC notation above isn't self explanatory, see below:

Another musical format which is stored as text is LilyPond. LilyPond is an extremely powerful "musical typesetting" application that stores its data as text. Like ABC, LilyPond was intended to be entered in as text and produces VERY nicely printable sheet music. Here is what the LilyPond format looks like:

Here's what the above file looks like after the LilyPond application turns it into printable sheet music:

There many other formats are not stored as character data and would not be easily read by humans, but are intended only to be understood by computer programs. Go to free printable sheet music home