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Free online sheet music is a great resource for music students and performers. There are many online archives for free sheet music, each of which has its benefits and drawbacks. Here is a short guide to four of the largest archives.

1. International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) hosts a collection of public domain music, manuscripts, and music by modern composers who have agreed to display their work at no charge. The bulk of the library's 30,000+ scores is instrumental music, although there is a considerable amount of vocal music and opera. Most of the files are scans of scores or manuscripts, making it very useful for students.

Because IMSLP is edited by many users working from many different sources, it has a much greater variety and amount of material than other online libraries, making it the ideal first stop for searches. Browsing is difficult, however, because the amount of material is overwhelming and users do not always categorize pieces correctly.

2. Choral Public Domain Library (CPDL) is an especially good resource for choral conductors, but less so for soloists and students. One benefit is that it allows offsite linking, so looking for one piece may lead you to other places to find music which may not be easy to locate with search engines. This may also be a drawback, however, as individual pages may be organized in confusing ways or written in foreign languages.

3. Variations Prototype: Online Musical Scores contains a wide selection of instrumental, vocal, and operatic literature from the William and Gayle Cook Music Library at Indiana University. It has the most limited selection of the archives listed so far, containing important works by important composers but not much unusual or difficult to find material. It is the most ideal site for online viewing, however, because it uses image files broken up into multiple pages rather than large .PDF files that may take several minutes to download. Variations is great for music students who need easily accessible study scores, but not for performers or for printing.

4. Werner Icking Music Archive (WIMA) contains an eclectic mix of music typeset with MusiXTeX software. Because all of its music is newly typeset, not scanned from old documents, it is generally easy to read. Although the archive contains many unusual and difficult to find pieces, its organization is not condusive to easy browsing, and so much of its content is only easily available to those who already know where to look.

Learn more about this author, Amelia Hill.
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