# Printing free music sheets economically



## Amaya&beet (Aug 4, 2006)

I have found a website containing music sheets of famous composers, which have run out of copyright and are now available to download free of charge as PDFs (however, it is allowed to download only 2 files/person/day): www.sheetmusicarchive.net

The precious music sheets you have collected would not be stored on hard disks for exhibition, but printed out, generally requiring many A4 paper sheets and at the same time consuming much of expensive ink. For conventional printing this is the case. Would you like to spare paper sheets and ink, while still receiving music sheets of high quality? I let 5 works of various composers printed, using extremely few sheets of paper for each work instead of borrowing heavy music books from the library. The whole sonata op.90 of Beethoven is compressed neatly into 4 sheets of papers, whereas in a music book it will spread over 15 pages.

Is that a trick? Yes, and it is very simple! Everything you need beside a reliable internet connection is an installed printer and Acrobat Reader 7.0.8, that can be downloaded at:
http://www.download.com/Adobe-Acrobat-Reader/3000-2378_4-10349804.html

After you have installed Adobe 7.0.8 (if you did not have before), I will guide you to spare paper sheets for music (using printer Canon PIXMA iP1600, so the dialog boxs of your printers may look different in some details):

- Step 1: open the music sheet (in PDF format) with Adobe 7.0.8
- Step 2: in the 'File' menu, choose 'Print', the 'Print' dialog box will appear.
- Step 3: in the printer section of the dialog box, choose the 'Properties' button. 
In the 'Printer property' dialog box
- Step 4: check the boxes 'Grayscale printing' and/or 'Preview before printing', which is optional but also important to avoid wasting paper accidentally. 
- Step 5: set the type of page to A4, check the boxes 'Landscape' and 'Duplex printing'.
- Step 6: in the 'Maintenance' section, find the Ink dialog box and choose 'Only Black'.
- Step 8: after applying all the preferences above, return to the main 'Print' dialog box.
Now do the followings: 
- Step 9: set the range of pages to be printed. You can let 2 pages of the PDF file printed each time - a safe method but taking a lot of time.
- Step 10: set 'Multiple pages per sheet', choose 'Custom', and set the ratio to *'2 to 1'*, set the presentation to 'Vertical'. 
- Step 11: let the PDF file printed in _*duplex method*_.

Now you just have to bind the cute music sheets together and be glad to save a lot of paper sheets, time and money!


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## 4/4player (Nov 17, 2006)

Thank you very much! This was very helpful..though I admit I usually am lazy to dowload sheet music..but rather buy scores..The Dover scores are quality sheet music at an affordable price!

4/4player


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## Krummhorn (Feb 18, 2007)

There's this Mutopia Site that I found while surfing one day. It is all public domain stuff - offers a good variety of download formats, and no daily limit, either.


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