Your music

ABC notation, MusicXML or letter notes. Paste it, open a file, or drop one here.

0:00 0:00
Key
0
Your music will appear here as sheet music.
Paste some above, or choose an example.

Click any note to play from there. Space plays and pauses.

🔒 Runs entirely in your browser. The music you paste or open is never uploaded, and the page keeps working offline once it has loaded.

How to use it

Paste your music into the box, or press Open a file. The player works out what kind of music it is, draws it as sheet music, and the Play button starts it. The note being played turns orange, and the page scrolls along with the music. Click any note to start from there.

  • Speed slows the music down to a quarter of its speed, or doubles it, without changing the pitch. The score’s own tempo marking is 100%.
  • Key moves the whole piece up or down a semitone at a time. The score is rewritten in the new key too, so you can read it there.
  • Loop starts again from the top when it reaches the end. Click adds a metronome tick on every beat (it’s switched off for music that changes tempo or time signature part-way through).
  • When the music has more than one part, such as a right and left hand, you can switch each one off and play along with the other. Chord symbols written above an ABC tune ("G", "D7") are played as a soft backing, which you can switch off too.
  • MIDI downloads the music as a .mid file for GarageBand, Logic, MuseScore or any other music app.

What you can paste

ABC notation

ABC is a way of writing music as plain text, and it’s how tens of thousands of folk and traditional tunes are shared online. Each tune starts with a few header lines (X: number, T: title, M: time signature, L: note length, K: key), then the notes: C D E F G A B from middle C upwards, lowercase c d e for the octave above, a number after a note to make it longer and | for bar lines. A file with several tunes in it gives you a list to choose from.

MusicXML

MusicXML is the file format notation programs use to swap scores. In MuseScore, Sibelius, Finale or Dorico it’s usually under File → Export. Choose MusicXML, then open the file here (compressed .mxl files work too) or paste its text into the box. Every part is played on the piano, and drum parts are left out.

Letter notes

The simple note names you see in beginner songbooks and on piano tutorial sites, such as E D C D E E E. Each note is one beat. Add a - after a note (or on its own) to hold it a beat longer, # or b for sharps and flats (F#, Bb), a number to choose the octave (C4 is middle C, C5 the C above it), r for a one-beat rest, | for a bar line and square brackets for a chord ([C E G]). Without a number, each note usually goes to the octave nearest the note before it, kept near the middle of the keyboard, which is what a tune usually does. A line with no bar lines gets one every four beats. Lines that aren’t notes, like a title or the words, are skipped.

I’ve got a PDF or a photo of the sheet music
A picture of music has to be read by an optical music recognition (OMR) program first, which turns it into MusicXML. Audiveris is a free, open-source one for Windows, Mac and Linux. Some notation programs can import a PDF too. Check the result against the original before you rely on it, because OMR gets things wrong, especially on handwritten or crowded pages. Then open the MusicXML here.
Where can I find music in ABC notation?
The Session has tens of thousands of Irish and folk tunes with an ABC version of each one, and abcnotation.com searches ABC tunes from all over the web. Copy the ABC and paste it here.
It says there were problems reading my music
The player plays what it could read and lists the lines it had trouble with. In ABC that’s usually a bar with too many or too few beats, or a symbol it doesn’t know. With MusicXML, very complex scores (lots of voices crossing between staves, or unusual tuplets) can come out with gaps. Open See it as ABC notation to check how it was read.
Does it play repeats?
Yes. Repeat signs and first and second endings are played as written. Jumps written as words, like D.C. al Fine or D.S. al Coda, aren’t followed. Louds and softs written into ABC are played, but they aren’t carried over from MusicXML.
Why is everything played on the piano?
To keep the page quick and working offline, it carries one instrument: a recording of a real grand piano. Violin, flute or voice parts are played on the piano at the pitch they really sound, and so are parts for transposing instruments in MusicXML: a B♭ clarinet or trumpet part is played a tone below where it’s written, just as the instrument would. It’s still the best way to hear how a part goes. Download the MIDI file to hear it with other instruments in a music app.
Why is there no sound?
Browsers only allow sound after you’ve clicked or tapped something on the page, so press Play rather than a keyboard shortcut the first time. If you still hear nothing, check the volume slider and your device’s volume. On an iPhone with an older version of iOS, the ring/silent switch also mutes web pages.
Does it work without the internet?
Yes. The first time you open the page, your browser saves a copy (the chip above says Saved for offline use when it’s done). After that it opens and plays with no connection. Only this page and the files it needs are saved.
Is the music I paste uploaded anywhere?
No. It’s read, drawn and played inside your browser, and the last thing you pasted is only kept on your own device so it’s still there next time. Like the rest of our site, the page itself uses Google Fonts and counts visits with Google Analytics (see our privacy policy).
Where do the piano sound and the sheet music drawing come from?
The piano is a recording of a real Yamaha C5 grand: the Salamander Grand Piano by Alexander Holm, shared under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence (we use a soft and a loud recording of every third key, made smaller). The sheet music is drawn by abcjs by Paul Rosen and Gregory Dyke, which is open source under the MIT licence. Our player reads MusicXML and letter notes, plays the piano and moves the highlight.

AI workshops for teams

Get your team confident with AI.

Interactive half-day and full-day workshops in Copilot, Claude or ChatGPT, run at your office - in Sydney, or anywhere we can fly to.