Comments for Sheet Music Search Engine

I’m thinking of posting a quote but I have a couple of questions…

Where will the data to be searched come from, and what format is it in (and wanted in on the site in the end)? Would a shopping cart be needed to buy for sale music?

Hi Patabugen. My wife started this project – we’re both into music and we’ve both found it hard to find sheet music when we want it. That’s the driver. It could be quite a big project … and I realise the project details are pretty unspecific about where the data will come from.

Ideas that come to mind:

• Use a bot to farm and collate data from other sites.
• Use some other offline database of sheet music, matching it up to online resources yourself or via your user base.
• Entering it all by hand. Hopefully not this one. :-)

Ideally you’d need to be a “sheet music user” to appreciate the development of this project (are you into music?). Though not a requirement, of course.

Hope that helps a bit. :-)

Replying to an email Patabugen sent me:

Just wondering if we could chat a ltitle more about the specifics. It’s one of my first decent sized (if you can call it that) so just wanted to be sure :)

Sure. The key thing for me is that it’d be very simple. Like Google – just one text box to enter your query into. (Or like DecentURL, my latest little side project.)

What I imagine is that you go there and type “pachelbel’s canon” or something, and it comes up with a clear list of sheet music. And it’d have versions in different keys and for different instruments, ideally with an image preview at a click. You could add “for:voice” or something to your search query to narrow it to a specific instrument type.

That’s just the big picture I have in mind. You’d probably want to start with a bit of research on how you’d collect the data … probably a web crawler that you give a list of good sheet music sites and get the data into a consistent form.