Welcome to the openbook web site

First, a small sample for the impatient...

If you want to see more and have a browser that supports showing pdf (google chrome) then click here. If this link does not work then just save the pdf file and open it on your desktop. You may need some software from Adobe or some other vendor to be able to open it.

Openbook is a 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. Open book 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. Currently there are no other contributors but I am hoping that this will change. Anyone is welcome to contribute.

The license for the project is currently GPL V3. 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 this 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 perl scripting language that is used to script 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 is at here
• The timidity tool used in openbook to convert from midi to wav and ogg is here
• The lame tool used to encode midi to mp3 is here

Some related project links:

• The openbook github project is here
• The web site for the project 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 file from which the pdf and postscript were created is here