About Wikifonia

Wikifonia is legally entitled to copy, offer and distribute author protected sheet music. Wikifonia indeed holds a licence to offer the sheet music on its website. The website users may therefore freely and legally, with respect of the terms and conditions, download sheet music for private use only. Private use shall be construed as personal use. It is the website user prohibited to sell, trade or distribute the sheet music downloaded from Wikifonia. Private use does not exclude professional use. The website user may download the music sheets for professional purposes but not to trade or sell the music sheets. Therefore professional musicians are of course invited to down- and upload sheet music as much and many times as they please. They are not entitled to sell the sheet music, which is indeed freely available.

As you know, Wikifonia is built on the promising MusicXML format, which is a portable file format between your favourite music notation program and the Wikifonia website. But MusicXML isn't suitable for visual presentation. That's why Wikifonia converts the MusicXML to the Lilypond format which can be rendered to high quality sheet music.
More information about Lilypond can be found on www.lilypond.org.

Wikifonia aims to supply sheet music in a different way. Unlike other sheet music websites, it offers

1. Improved musical and visual quality. Numerous websites offer sheet music of poor quality: text files, incomplete sheets, no notes, etc. For musical quality, Wikifonia relies on you. Once registered, you can easily alter erroneous or incomplete sheets, through our simple and transparent collaboration scheme. As for visual quality, Wikifonia uses a vector-based rendering process to generate your sheet. This implies high-quality pdf's, and no pixels (check out the zoom!). Sheets, just like you want them to be.
2. A legal framework. A lot of sites are now being closed because they don't provide renomeration for the copyright owners. In a way, sheet music you downloaded or published on these sites is endangered, and might be off-line soon. Through a contract with copyright holders, Wikifonia commits herself to pay a fixed amount per sheet per month, so as to ensure that the original artists get their share. This legal framework we consider necessary for the durability of our commitment: collaborating on sheets with you.

Wikifonia is a website where you can find lead sheets. They are all created and revised by the Wikifonia community. From each sheet you find on Wikifonia, you can download a high quality pdf file. You can use the sheets for personal use only.