Embed MuseScore/MusicXML in a web page
Hello,
In my (entry level) Music Analysis class we work on many small scores in MusicXML format.
For educational purposes, we would like to share those scores on the web: the webpage should render the score and provide basic playback capabilities (start, stop, playback line are enough).
The only MusicXML players I could find are cloud based services: you upload the scores to their cloud, and they render the score with playback features. Those cloud based services are either targeting music publishers or professional musicians and are all paid services. So they are not suitable for educational (non-commercial) purposes.
Some of them provide free accounts but they allow only a limited number of scores.
Is there a web plugin or JavaScript library or anything else that I can embed in a webpage to render and playback a score hosted on my server?
The solution should be open source (free) and allow an unlimited number of scores (that I can host on my web server). No, the idea is not to write my own plugin/library.
Can MuseScore help on this topic?
The only link I have found on this forum is a very old one from 2008 (https://musescore.org/en/node/219).
Thanks a lot in advance!
Comments
MuseScore can help probably more than you think it can: https://musescore.org/en/handbook/share-scores-online-0 However, as with other cloud-based services you mentioned, the free account comes with a limited number of scores—in this case, five. I doubt there are any services that support an unlimited number of scores for free.
In reply to MuseScore can help probably by Isaac Weiss
Hello @ZackTheCardshark, thank you for your reply...even though I was hoping for a different answer :-)
Check http://wim.vree.org/js/index.html
However be aware that that the There ain't no such a thing as a free lunch and that free software developers need to make a living too. So any help you can give to MuseScore is very welcome, either by using (and paying for) Musescore.com or by donating your time or money.
In reply to Check by [DELETED] 5
Hello @Iasconic, thank you for your reply. I will certainly give a closer look at wim.vree :-)
I am not going to start a fight but I still believe that education should be freely accessible to anybody and it's a pity that there isn't a modern and free way to share (and play) sheet samples with my fellow students.
As far as contributing goes, in class I was the one yelling "MuseScore...you don't need anything else"...I will see if I can contribute with some coding (if there is anything Java related) but I don't feel like paying 49$ per year for unlimited storage of files I could host on my own website...just because I need to share them with other students for the sake of sharing knowledge. It would have been a great deal if I were a composer willing to sell my own music...but it is certainly not the case :-)
Anyway thanks for your time!
In reply to Hello @Iasconic, thank you by zxxz
I might suggest that there is a modern and free way to share (and play) sheet samples—a certain open source music notation program. ;-) When I want to share some sheet music, I attach it to an email and say "Attached is a musical score in MSCZ format—this can be opened with a free program called MuseScore which you can get from https://musescore.org."
Or, you could use MuseScore.com to share the first five while exhorting people to install MuseScore, in advance of hitting the site's limit and then simply sharing the files directly.
MuseScore...you don't need anything else! ;-)
In reply to I might suggest that there is by Isaac Weiss
Thank you! I agree 100%. MS IS free, but their extra convenient services are not. No problem with that, if these services pay the powerbills for the download servers.
Oli
In reply to Hello @Iasconic, thank you by zxxz
education should be freely accessible
This is impossible. Someone got to pay for it, as teachers need to make their living. I agree that it shouldn't be the pupils or students to have to pay for it, but someone got to, like tax payers.
And scores would be freely accessible to pupils or students on MuseScore.com, they just won't for the teacher.
In reply to education should be freely by Jojo-Schmitz
Perhaps I should have phrased it differently: knowledge sharing should be freely accessible.
I am a student just like any other fellow student in my class, I am certainly not a teacher, and I am maintaining a website with the syllabus of the course.
Why? Because it helps me keep my notes clean, because the other students can use it as a reference, and because my ultimate goal is to simply share what I learn, the knowledge that is accessible to me, with anybody else who might be interested in those topics, or perhaps do not have this kind of knowledge accessible...
Paying 49$ per year for "unlimited storage" is not a fair price...how much storage are we talking about? but what bothers me the most is that I would be paying 49$ per year just to be able to embed scores that I create in a website I maintain and that is 100% free for anybody...
Furthermore, there is no difference between "unlimited score snippets of a few bars used in an educational free website" and "unlimited concerto for orchestra scores of many pages that I sell online"...
Looking at their subscription types, at Avid (Sibelius) they don't give a damn about educators anymore (their deprecated Scorch plugin was wonderful), they are interested only in resellers, but from MuseScore I would have expected something different...again 49$ for a "web player" is not acceptable...
This is just my 2 cents of course.
In reply to Perhaps I should have phrased by zxxz
It is their business model, take it or leave it and go to Dropbox etc...
In reply to Perhaps I should have phrased by zxxz
If it was not affordable to you, you could always share .mid-files and the relevant sheet-music as pdf. OR you share the musescore files as you were told before. Their exist even possibilities to make video-sheet-music with the help of a video editor (I used Blender NLE some years ago for educational purposes...worked great after a stiff learning curve)
Nowadays we have thousand possibilities to reach our goals in educational media production. The most busy people like to pay for the convenient ways, the others may go the other not-so-convenient ways, but also learn a lot by doing this.
The not-so-convenient ways had never been so powerful and feature-rich before, believe me! So start thinking out of the box and MAKE cool EduMaterial yourself or invest these 49$.
Oliver
(Are you interrested in the technology MuseScore uses for their onlinePlayer? Yes? Then ask for the Technology behind the expensive service; maybe it is an openSourceThing, too? Ask for that and decide if that was installable on your webserver.)
In reply to Perhaps I should have phrased by zxxz
People who dedicate their lives to developing free software need to eat too. Figuring out what set of services to charge for in order to support the free software is a tricky business. Paying for this service might not be ac acceptable to you, which is fine, you don't have to use the service. But it's acceptable to many who do value the service and also want to support the developers of the free software. It's a good model.
In reply to Check by [DELETED] 5
Is the html5 generator behidn musescore.com available anywhere?
Thanks!
In reply to Is the html5 generator behidn by rogerdpack
Any score from MuseScore.com can be embedded anywhere. Check the "Share" button on the right side of a score page to get the embed code.
First of all, let me state that I don't want to start a flame with my words. That said, I have to point out that, should I do my job as a teacher remaining within the limits imposed by my wage, my pupils would loose quite a lot of opportunities. The fact is that my job is fifty/fifty earning and volunteering. Should I make a step back and just do what I'm paid for? Probably that's the case, but it wouldn't be a great deal for the sake of the education of so many people. Have I to be regarded as a fool as I keep on doing things for free? Mmm... that's something to muse on. (pun intended -- have a loud laugh with me)
In reply to First of all, let me state by Aldo
...back to the technical side of your question.
I thought about a way to give you the ability to make this sexy sheet music videos with oss tools yourself.
At first here the link to my crappy example, but I did it straightforward without optimising image quality, the view itself or the exact position of the "cursor":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjw8a_6w5bA
The product of the effort is just the video. The sheet music is made with musescore, animation and videogeneration is made with blender (blender.org). Since that workflow works with normal image- and soundfiles, you can animate also eg scanned sheet music and/or underlay it with recorded music...For the last purpose there doesn't exist an automated way anyway
btw, guys, peace is precious...
ADDED:
I rendered out the same (but shorter) example with a better quality and loaded it up to youtube (good bye, image quality)
https://youtu.be/6BtTrPc3dxI
In reply to ...back to the technical side by olivo
Hello olivo, thank you for your efforts and for taking the conversation back to something interesting :-)
I saw your videos and I am impressed! I never thought of the approach you suggests.
I will certainly take a look at blender.org!
I learned something new with your post, so a big thank you :-)
Mmm... let me suggest a simple method to achieve something similar to your video. You could open your .mscz regular file in MuseScore, then launch a screen-capture software and set it so that it grabs just the area you need. Press the "Play" button in MuseScore and wait as long as needed. Stop the screen-capture software and load the resulting video in a video-editing software to perform the needed cut and add the audio track. "Export" the whole thing, and you are done.
In reply to Mmm... let me suggest a by Aldo
Maybe, but my third example would be not possible your way; not that someone asked for...
https://youtu.be/MT7lQli00AM
...same data, more fun, less usability :)
But you are right, that should work if you find nice screen capture software (which should oss or at least free...)
He could use ??? ...it's not free, but only 49$...:)
My way, like said before, gives you the advantage of being independent from the source of your media, as it works with scanned or photographed sheet music and recorded sound the same way. That can be pretty handy when you prepare educational material, and you want to show eg that one small section of a big orchestra score, you really don't want to entry first in musescore, espacially if you own the (physical)sheet music and also the CD with the record on it...and you think about your scanner and find, that it has been unemployed for a much too long time...
In reply to Maybe, but my third example by olivo
...this version is indeed more fun but less educational :-) again, good to know that that is possible!
In reply to Mmm... let me suggest a by Aldo
Hello Aldo, thank you for your message. I think this is indeed a good idea for what I need....not as good as playing directly the MusicXML score on the web but good enough :-)
I think I will use ffmpeg for the editing (cropping) part. This weekend I will see if I can automate the process with some script :-)
In reply to Hello Aldo, thank you for by zxxz
There is the scorch plugin ... see example... but it too does not produce a avi file... guess the screen capture is the best. Which screen capture has anyone used that is easy to use and free?
http://www.scoreexchange.com/scores/21185.html
In reply to There is the scorch plugin by victor pierobon
VLC and FFMPEG. Worked both as expected, but little research was necessary.
In reply to There is the scorch plugin by victor pierobon
Unfortunately the Scorch plugin is not supported anymore...by "not supported" I mean that not only Sibelius stopped developing it but also that it doesn't work with any modern browser due to its NPAPI nature. I wish there was an alternative that would work these days...
I got good results with the free version of Debut: http://www.nchsoftware.com/capture/
I found cropping, copy/pasting and adding an audio track really easy to achieve tasks with the free version of VideoPad: http://www.nchsoftware.com/videopad/index.html
I'm pretty sure that there are many other free softwares around that can do the same job as well as Debut and VideoPad do.
That might work out well (though it does seem to lack a few features that other viewers have, like transposing, printing )
I guess the real question is "can I hook up with the musescore api and offer users of my sheet music website ability to view their files through musescore.com embedded" (i.e is me offering it to multiple users of my website OK, with a single pro account? I'd love to do it.)
Thanks!
In reply to That might work out well by rogerdpack
Sure, you can if the scores are hosted on a single pro account on musescore.com. You can reach out to support@musescore.com to explain your use case more in details.
Very old question, but maybe you still need help.
Copy the link that you get on the online version of MuseScore (“Share” - “Embed on your site”). On a google site, you can just add the link anywhere you want in the html version of the site.
Worked very easily for me, and I bet by now you found several solutions yourself. I just wanted to once offer help and not just benefit from online forums, which have helped me out on so many occasions.
All the best,
Noah
In reply to Very old question, but maybe… by Teacher Tauche
There are some very good but free software packages available, look at OpenShot Video Editor. It is pretty powerful and has transitions and effects, multi-track, etc, all the things you would expect in a high quality video editing suite. It is open source so if you don't like it, you haven't spent anything and can simply un-install it. It's all up on what you want to do. For a simple video, Vegas is decent, but if you want to get into more effects, I'd go with Premiere Pro and After Effects. If you were thinking of going into movie making as a career, I'd go with Final Cut Pro. More.... http://net-informations.com/q/mis/video.html
Hello!!!
Problem solved!
I've looking for it nowadays, then I've found this page:
https://github.com/w3c/musicxml/wiki/MusicXML-HTML5
OpenSheetMusicDisplay worked perfect here! An example follows in annex.