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[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

> While poking around I also found some examples of the sort of output you can 
> get if you are not too careful at:
> www.virtualsheetmusic.com.
> $37/year gets you unlimited downloads of classical and/or Christmas music for 
> various instruments, and a vote in deciding what to add to the site.
>
> Uncorrected errors included jagged instead of straight lines in music where 
> four 8th notes were connected by a line connecting equal-length stems 
> (sloping), and in another piece where 16th notes were connected by horizontal 
> double lines, these were frequently turned into wide single lines.  Sometimes 
> they were a bit of both.
>
> This is a really cheap and convenient way to get copies of lots of music, but 
> it is not as readable as it might be without much editing.  But at this price 
> you can't expect people to take a lot of time editing.
>
> If you don't pay the $37, you can download for pay, for instance $6 for the 
> Bach 3-part inventions.  This might be cheaper than paper.

Since all of their pieces looked to be the same format but the quality was 
poor, they are NOT using music publishing software to write them but are 
scanning from other copies and then removing identifying features, and not 
doing much of an editing job.  It was suggested by my piano teacher that 
this is pirated work, or at least that many websites offer pirated work 
from recent published editions.



I also checked out:
sheetmusic1.com - a very small collection of easy pieces for beginners, 
much better quality, edited to make everything look good except for the 
phrasing and diagonal lines - I don't think any software used by any of 
these sites does that right.

www.everynote.com - free views of the first page of over 10,000 pieces, 
and the samples I downloaded appear to have been scanned but not edited 
all that well, or the originals were poor, implying that they copied older 
editions which are no longer copyrighted, so this would be legal.  They 
also were written up in the NY Times.  Sixteenth notes often became 
eighth-note-like due to a double line fusing into a wide single line. 
They do have a huge selection at $1-2 per piano piece or small collection.

sheetmusicarchives.net.  Two free downloads a day or $20 for the CD 
(excluding Ravel and the 20th century Russians if you don't live in the 
USA, for legal reasons!).  The best quality of all on the two scanned 
pieces I downloaded, which seem carefully edited but still have slightly 
jagged phrasing and diagonal lines.  They have a smaller but still a 
respectable collection which is mostly scanned from older public domain 
editions of public domain pieces, but much of it is also 'computer 
typeset'.  I don't know if this means using a music OCR program with a 
scanner, or starting from scratch and typing in all the notes from printed 
copy.  Computers must be a real boon to composers.

There is even a free pdf file of a scanned copy of a piece handwritten by 
Bach, to mix old with new technology.

Too bad linux does not yet have music OCR.  I will look into compiling 
GOCR for text character recognition.  There are also separate linux or 
SunOS OCR programs for Chinese or Japanese, which is really amazing 
because of so many different characters.

Sorry to sidetrack this discussion away from basiclinux, but most of the 
above sites also provide MIDI versions of their music files which can be 
played with OSS sound cards in BL with a sound-enabled kernel while 
viewing the pdf files with xpdf.

ESS also made some AWE32-compatible sound cards ending in 888.

I have to try listening (with AWE) to something other than piano.