About WikiMusic.org

WikiMusic.org is a free, static, browser-based practice desk for keyboard musicians. It provides a curated catalog of ABC scores for reading, playback, printing, and personal local editing.

Public scores are selected and reviewed by the site operator. Personal scores, settings, annotations, and SoundFonts remain in your browser.

History

The WikiMusic.org idea started in 2015. The original idea was a collaborative collection of public-domain classical sheet music: contributors would transcribe scores and improve one another's work, much as people build Wikipedia. That is where the “Wiki” in the name came from. ABC was a natural choice because it is readable plain text that can be rendered directly in a browser. Limited early OMR, heavy manual correction, too few scores, and the legal exposure of an open contribution platform eventually sent the project into hibernation.

The project woke again in 2026 after a series of LLM-assisted conversion experiments made a substantial browser-readable catalog practical. The name remains, but the “Wiki” has moved from the server to the client: the public catalog is curated and read-only, while people can open, change, save, and export their own scores locally in the browser. The longer story of the experiments, failures, and breakthroughs will be shared through the WikiMusic.org Patreon project diary.

Acknowledgements

WikiMusic.org is possible because of free software and openly documented music-notation projects. In particular, we thank:

• Jean-François Moine, author of abcm2ps and abc2svg, used for browser rendering and playback;
• Michael Methfessel, who wrote the original abc2ps;
• the FreePats project for the CC0 Upright Piano KW SoundFont;
• the GNU LilyPond project and Frescobaldi for music engraving and score preparation; LilyPond also publishes its own sponsoring information;
• Willem Vree's xml2abc MusicXML-to-ABC tools;
• Chris Walshaw, who created ABC; and
• Guido Gonzato, author of Making Music with ABC 2.

Musical sources and communities

We are equally grateful to the libraries, volunteer engravers, editors, and score-sharing communities that make classical music available in forms that musicians and software can study and reuse:

• IMSLP / Petrucci Music Library, for preserving and organizing an extraordinary collection of public-domain scores and historical editions. IMSLP describes ways to help on its site-support page;
• the Mutopia Project, whose volunteers have created editable, openly licensed engravings of classical music and demonstrated the lasting value of sharing both finished scores and their notation sources. Mutopia welcomes typesetting, proofreading, corrections, and technical help on its contribution page; and
• the MuseScore community and MuseScore Studio contributors, who make notation, score exchange, and practical music knowledge accessible to a broad community. MuseScore currently asks supporters to contribute time rather than money and lists the available routes on its support page.

These links lead to the projects' own pages or established project references. Where an upstream project publishes a contribution or sponsorship route, please consider giving it your support.

Support WikiMusic.org

WikiMusic.org is free to use. You can support its continued development through Patreon. It is an ordinary external link, not an embedded service. Support does not purchase access to scores or influence catalog publication decisions.