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This user is a Sysop. |
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 community.
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.
It's time for me to resume the year 2009 and plan for the futute.
This year I contributed about 300 scores on IMSLP, about 200 of them being scanned on my own the others taken from third party and sized to 600dpi and postproducted.
I tested with different scanning and postproduction techniques and ended with a cookbook to get high quality scans. Now I went back from 1200dpi scanning to 600dpi, use the filter explained in the cookbook and clean the result manually. All in all this method takes me between 5 and 10 minutes per page, so the number of scores I can provide is small (although I spent a lot of time with these scores this year!!!).
For the futute I want to shorten the "per page time" needed and won't do any more manual cleaning of the scores (except perhaps some "First edition" scores). If somebody like me to clean a certain score she/he may ask me for it. I own so many scores and want at least to get most of them onto IMSLP (and there are other possibilities with scores from libraries too).
A happy 2010 to everybody.
| Burgmüller, Friedrich |
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Burgmüller, Friedrich
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| Chopin, Frederic |
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Chopin, Frederic Klindworth Edition: Fr. Chopin Oeuvres complètes
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| Clementi, Muzio |
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| Debussy, Claude |
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| Hummel, Johann Nepomuk |
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| Jensen, Adolf |
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| Liszt, Franz |
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| Mendelssohn, Felix |
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| Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus |
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| Raff, Joseph Joachim |
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| Ravel, Maurice |
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| Reger, Max |
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| Saint-Saëns, Camille |
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| Schumann, Robert |
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| Scriabin, Alexander |
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| Talexy, Adrien |
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| Weber, Carl Maria von |
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| Various composers |
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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.
| Brahms, Johannes |
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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.
The scores I provided since the beginning of 2010 are no longer manually cleaned (except some stamps of the library). I did batch scaling with irfan, cleaned the BSB logo automatically with PhotoLine and put the different works together in one pdf.
Finally I succeded to upload the whole Breitkopf edition - puh!
I won't add the remaining links to all pages here, you can find all links on the Franz Liszt - Liszt-Stiftung Edition page.
The following scans are taken from Loeb Music Library.
They are originally color scans at about 300dpi. I resized them to approximately 600dpi and changed to monocrome. Then I made use of the quality filter that I also work on my own 600dpi scans.
| Debussy, Claude |
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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 critic.
These are the links for the JAVA tool to download full resolution scans from library sites.
File:BNFscanDownload.zip
File:BNFscanDownload jar.zip
MSD howto page
pages with scans using the MSD
Special Pages
EU-Server image links
Pages with commercial recordings
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