How can i listen to the music on IMSLP?

I am sure we all agree that IMSLP have an amazing collection of music. It has become a standard resource when a score isn’t to hand or some part is missing, and for many other purposes. I don’t know about you but sometimes I just like to browse. I get scores up on my PC screen I didn’t even know existed. Some of them are pretty messy I’ll admit; but for any even half well known piece they usually have at least one good edition. Bach keyboard, organ, chamber – eat your heart out.

But unless you eat scores for breakfast the feature you miss is the ability to play them back. Why can’t you listen to IMSLP score?

Well to hear IMSLP score you need Optical Music Recognition (OMR) – a music scanning program.  These days you don’t need an expensive PC program, you can use the PlayScore 2 app – even to play an IMSLP score.

Now I have been using PlayScore 2 to help me with my piano assignments for a while. It works like a dream. I can just snap the music and hear what the music is supposed to sound like before I try it myself – takes a lot of the agony out of sight reading in fact. Well, as I say I am sitting there looking at this Bach in Safari on my iPhone and suddenly I had the thought ‘maybe PlayScore 2 will play IMSLP music for me’.  So I tapped the export econ and there was the option ‘Copy to PlayScore 2”.

As soon as I tapped the option up comes PlayScore 2 showing thumbnails of all the IMSLP score I want to listen to.  Just to try it out I selected the first three.  In 5 seconds I was listening to an IMSLP score.