Here are some introductory notes on a preliminary search, relating to some new software I was testing and installing as a favour.

* IMSLP/Petrucci Music Library. Free Public Domain Sheet Music, with 140,000 works at May 2019. No preview, and a 20 second delay on each PDF download while an appeal for donations is displayed. It seems they’re not closely tracking Archive.org, as I couldn’t find a couple of newer public domain items I know are on Archive.org.

* Musopen is the other large repository of free sheet music. You get a visual preview of the sheets, and PDF download links are open and quick. But the results from its keyword search is very bad. You’ll do better with a site: search in Google or DuckDuckGo…

site:https://musopen.org/music/ keywords

* Metadata tagging on Archive.org is patchy for sheet music. Thought it will often have ‘sheet music’ or ‘sheetmusic’ or ‘score’ in its title. Theoretically it seems it should have a ‘sheet music’ topic tag, but often the uploaders don’t tag their upload with that. The best initial wide searches are:

sheetmusic AND mediatype:texts keywords

“sheet music” AND mediatype:texts keywords

Which together suggest Archive.org currently has about 10,000 sheet music booklets, nearly all of an age to be in the public domain. Including much 1910s and 20s rag-time, marching music, and popular ditties.

* ChoralWiki has a very large collection of public domain choral sheet music.

* The Mutopia Project has a small collection of classical works.

* Band Music a large collection of American marching-band sheet music.

* American university libraries also have very large online collections, usually general popular and light classical music.

I don’t know of any unified one-box search that will search across all of the above. It might be an interesting project to create one, but I won’t be doing that — so feel free to give it a go.

* For audio preview of the music score, you’ll first need to get away from your default MIDI sounds driver. Doing this used to be fiendishly complex, but is now extremely easy with the fine bit of Windows freeware called VirtualMIDISynth. Install, and it takes over from your Windows MIDI sounds driver, and then you add a free .SF2 soundfont to it — so that it has the instruments it needs to play a score with.

Then you need to OCR your sheet music into software player-readable form. For sheet music OCR is termed “OMR”. If you’re using the leading paid Sibelius sheet-music player and writer (termed ‘scorewriters’ by those in the trade), then you’ll find that works seamlessly with the leading PhotoScore “OMR” software. PhotoScore uses the SharpEye SDK, widely said by eagle-eyed music industry testers to be the most accurate at picking out and interpreting all the complex fine detail of a music score.

Then you save your successful scan to an .OPT file and Sibelius can load and play this as if it were a .MP3 file. Your new VirtualMIDISynth audio driver and soundfont makes it sound lovely.

I’d like to recommend some free open source OMR -> Scorewriter software, but I had no success with it and the OMR end of the process is especially lacking and clunky (Java). As someone who’s been away from the world of music for many years, I had the feeling that the robust commercial impetus in the music professions means that it’s hard for open source software makers to stand the pace.

Situation: When Windows opens a .txt file it will only launch the 64-bit version of Notepad++. How does the user force Windows to open .txt files with the 32-bit Windows, when both the 32-bit and 64-bit Notepad++ are installed? The usual routes of Windows file association and using the Notepad++ Preferences settings have both failed.

Reason for wanting 32-bit: The user may prefer the older version, for light editing, for the time being. Because it supports useful plugins such as MultiClip Viewer and others.

Solution: Open the Windows Registry editor (Start: ‘Regedit’) and navigate down to…

HKEY_CURRENT_USER/software/classes/applications/notepad++.exe/shell/open/command

There replace the 64-bit file path with the 32-bit path. Which means, for me…

C:\Program Files\Notepad++\notepad++.exe

to

C:\Program Files (x86)\Notepad++\notepad++.exe

… and then exit the Registry Editor.

Perhaps it’s just the influence of Inkle’s new Heaven’s Vault game, with the epigraphy of its mysterious alien inscriptions, but I’ve taken a bit of a shine to regex. My first failed tests with the Notepad++ regex were obviously with the ‘wrong type’ of regex, as I now know there are slightly different versions for Windows, Linux etc. But I’ve now found commands that do work for me.

The following were found by scouring forums and were then tested while learning more about Notepad++ and how it works (it’s a lot deeper than it looks). They’re actual working practical examples, tested and working with the latest Notepad++ on Windows 64-bit. My testing suggests that exactly the same macros run differently in the old 32-bit vs. new 64-bit Notepad++. Since (so far as I can tell) plugin activity cannot be recorded in macros, I assume the difference is due to regex support.

Please note that I am clueless about writing these things, only knowing how to search for, find and test them. So don’t ask me to advise you on their devising or tweaking. My many thanks especially to guy038 at the Notepad++ forum, and many and various others, for writing these and helping others find solutions. I found that the search-engine Yippy, based on Bing, is especially good at finding these things, and will almost inevitably lead you to guy038. But, so far as I know, he has not made a regex ‘keyring’ or a ‘cookbook’ or suchlike. Hence my need to collect some working examples here under practical headings.

All but one of these regexes (regexii?) run in the ‘Find’ or ‘Replace’ box in Notepad++. One needs to run in the ‘Mark’ tab in the same box…

On your keyboard, it’s useful to know that Ctrl + Home will take your text cursor (‘caret’) back to the top of the Notepad++ page, which may be useful if you are building these commands into a recorded macro.

Lastly, using regex to fiddle with public HTML seems to be frowned on, so I suggest the following are useful for certain offline text cleaning and data-swivelling operations, not for mission-critical coding or live pages.

The list:

The list has to be posted here in plain text as a .PDF. I had a blog post all done and polished, but then found that WordPress.com blogs make an utter mess of posted regex code, even when wrapping it with the code tags which are supposed to protect snippets of code! So here are the working regexes in a handy four-page .PDF file…

regex2020.PDF (updated May 2020)

New version! My Little Regex Cookbook, for Notepad++ (updated September 2020)