Licenses and credits

PianoKite's library has 2,153 pieces in 2,804 versions. Every composition is in the public domain, and every file is public domain or under an open Creative Commons license. Each piece's page on this site shows its credit, its license with a link, and its source.

Music sources

The Mutopia Project

Many pieces come from the Mutopia Project, where volunteers typeset public-domain music with LilyPond. Each file is credited on its piece page to its typesetter ("Typeset by … for the Mutopia Project"). Mutopia files are released as Public Domain, CC BY or CC BY-SA (versions 2.5 to 4.0); the exact license is linked on each page. Under CC BY-SA, adaptations of these files must be shared under the same license.

MuseScore public-domain scores (PDMX)

Other pieces, and most easy arrangements, are scores that MuseScore users published as Public Domain or CC0, selected from the PDMX dataset: Long, P., Novack, Z., Berg-Kirkpatrick, T. and McAuley, J. (2024), PDMX: A Large-Scale Public Domain MusicXML Dataset for Symbolic Music Processing. The dataset is licensed under CC BY 4.0. Only scores with a Public Domain or CC0 license and no license conflict were used, and each one was reviewed by hand.

What was changed

The MIDI files are converted from the source scores. Text events such as lyrics were removed; the notes are as published. Difficulty levels, keys, moods, eras and collections were added by our own analysis.

Sound

The piano sound in the app and in the website's player is the YDP Grand Piano from FreePats (Yamaha Disklavier Pro samples by Zenph Studios), licensed under CC BY 3.0. The app's sample set is converted to a compressed SoundFont, and the website uses a small subset converted to MP3.

Notation font

The app draws the score with the Bravura SMuFL font by Steinberg, under the SIL Open Font License.

On this website

Each piece page plays a 20-second excerpt of its file in the browser, credited and under the same license as the source file. The full files aren't published here; the original files are available from the sources above under their licenses. Public Domain and CC0 files need nothing; for CC BY and CC BY-SA files, credit the typesetter as shown on the piece page and link the license. For background, read free, legal piano MIDI files: what public domain means.

Report a problem

If you believe a piece shouldn't be here, or a credit is wrong, please contact the developer through the contact details on the app's Google Play listing. You can also email hello@pianokite.com.