Welcome to the OpenBook web site

current version is 0.0.1

A demo for the impatient is here

You can download the latest version of OpenBook from here.

openbook is an open source project to build a free, high quality "real book" for Jazz musicians. A real book simply means a big book with lots of Jazz tunes or standards as they are more widely known. openbook will always remain free and is guarateed so by it's license. The goal of production is beautiful and lightweight postscript and PDF real books with Jazz tunes. The idea is that the end user can control the final output and decide if he/she wants lyrics, size of paper, transposition for trumpet, selection of tunes and more. In addition you can produce midi, mp3 and ogg outputs. The end user can also, obviously, modify add or remove tunes or use the tunes in openbook as the basis of arrangements.

The project is developed by me, Mark Veltzer, and you can contact me at mark.veltzer@gmail.com. There is already a handful of contributors who contributed or are contributing to this project and you can see the ones that are contributing by name in the git changelog. Some are contributing anonymously because of copyright issues. Anyone is welcome to contribute anonymously or by name (it is your choice).

The license for the project is currently GPLV3. This is only so because I did not have time to think more deeply about the issue. It may change in the future as a result of future thinking on my part and the fact that I am the only copyright holder. The fact that the tunes inside the book have their own copyright holders complicates matters. In any case I am committed to keeping the project free in the free software sense and you are well within your rights to take a snapshot of it and continue developing it on your own when and if you feel that a future license selection does not match your expectations.

Why did I start this ?

I wanted to learn Jazz and a good way to do that is to write down the tunes (amongst many many other things).
I wanted beautiful sheet music that I could fiddle with.
I did not want to pay for the overly expensive real or fake books out there.
I believe in free software and wanted free (in the sense of freedom) sheet music.
Jazz is a prime example of a free type of art so combining it with free software seems a match made in heaven.
Jazz musicians may need beautiful electronic Real books because electronic books are starting to be used by Jazz musicians both for practice and for performance.

Future ideas include:

supporting mobile reading formats like epub
producing a mobile application for various platforms that musicians could use on their portable pads. This app would show them their music sheets and allow them to search for standards.

Links to tools used by the openbook project:

The git tool used as a source control system for openbook is here
The GNU make system used to build openbook is here
The python scripting language that is used to script openbook is here
The mako templating engine for python that is used in openbook is here
The lilypond language and compiler used to develop the tunes in openbook is here
The timidity tool used to convert from midi to wav and ogg in openbook is here
The lame tool used to encode midi to mp3 in openbook is here

Some related openbook project links:

The openbook github project is here
The openbook web site for the project is here
The openbook git clone link is here
The latest stable pdf coming out of the openbook project is here
The latest stable postscript coming out of the openbook project is here
The latest stable lilypond coming out of the openbook project is here