About Mind For Music

Welcome!

Here you will find an ever growing database of song and solo transcriptions, arrangements of jazz, contemporary and traditional music, valuable online practice tools and important information/concepts pertaining to modern and traditional forms of music and art, all free to use and share.

Mind For Music was originally intended as a way for musicians and music lovers to share solo and song transcriptions with each other over the web, all free of charge and solely for educational and personal use. All the transcriptions on this site come from the hard work of individual musicians who have uploaded or otherwise sent their interpretations of these works to be shared by the world-wide music community, for the purposes of academic study, individual practice or for other personal uses. Nothing is being sold on this website, but donations to keep the site running are always accepted (click here for more info on donations).

Upload File Types

File types will vary from song to song but the following formats for transcriptions are accepted:

PDF (preferred)
Image (JPG, GIF, BMP etc...)
Finale (MUS)
Sibelius (SIB)
MuseScore (New!)
DOC/DOCX (as long as they are layed out correctly)

Of course, not everyone has access to a computer with either Finale or Sibelius so if you want your transcription to reach the most amount of people possible the best idea would be to convert it to a PDF. However if you do this, I would suggest uploading both the original program file for those who have it as well as the converted pdf as Finale and Sibelius users may want to use the playback features in their programs to aid in the learning process. Also, Finale and Sibelius both offer free downloads of both Finale Notepad and Sibelius Scorch respectively, these are little tools that will allow you to play and view files created on their respective programs.

File Conversion

In order to streamline transcription sharing here are a few tips and programs to help you convert your files into the appropriate file types.

For transcriptions, the following file formats are acceptable for upload:

• -PDF
• -JPG/GIF/BMP/PNG
• -Music program files (Finale, Sibelius, MuseScore etc...)
• -Word documents (DOC and DOCX)

PDF is the preferred type as it is the most universal and therefore the easiest to share online. Finale and Sibelius files on the other hand are much more interactive and can be changed, transposed and corrected after they have been downloaded. Word documents are recommended as a last resort unless you are only listing the chord changes of a piece.

Thankfully, both Finale and Sibelius offer free programs that can be used to view and print their respective file types. For Finale files, use Finale Notepad and for Sibelius use Sibelius Scorch.

In order to conver Finale and Sibelius files to pdf there are two methods programs you can use. Firstly, you can export the file to a PDF from inside both Finale and Sibelius, however if you are using an older version of either of those programs you may have to use some third party software to do this. We recommend CutePDF which allows you to virtually print from your program onto a pdf. After you install the program, simply go to the print menu and select "Cutepdf" from the list of printers and you will get an instant copy of your work as a pdf. Nothing will actually be printed when you do this, the program just imitates a printer, converting the file instead.

There are other programs that will convert Finale, Sibelius and pdf files to image files (jpg, bmp, gif and png), although which one you use will depend on your OS (Mac, Windows etc...) and other factors. There are however a few online tools available:

PDF2JPG - Converts pdf files to jpg

PDF Combine - Combine multiple PDF files into one singel file (useful for stringing together big band charts from seperate parts).

If you have any other questions about file sharing, feel free to contact us.