Classical music player
A free player for some of the greatest music ever written — Beethoven symphonies, and keyboard works by Bach, Mozart, Chopin, Debussy and more. Every piece is a public-domain MIDI score played live in your browser through a real soundfont (no recordings are streamed). Watch it on the piano roll, or, for the keyboard pieces, flip to live music notation and follow the score as it plays.
Why this is legal. These compositions are centuries old and their composers died well over 70 years ago, so the works are in the public domain worldwide. What can still be under copyright is a specific recording or a specific edition/MIDI sequence. Nothing is recorded here — the audio is synthesised live from note data — and every MIDI file below comes from a source that licenses it as public domain or Creative Commons, credited under Scores & credits. (General information, not legal advice.)
How it works
Each piece is a standard MIDI file: a list of notes, times and instruments, with no audio in it at all. Your browser reads the file and plays each note through a soundfont — a bank of short recorded instrument samples — so the same file can sound like a grand piano or a full orchestra. The piano roll draws every note as a bar (time runs left to right, pitch bottom to top); the notation view renders the actual score and moves a cursor in time with the audio. The keyboard works are hand-typed scores; the larger orchestral pieces are complete public-domain MIDI files, so they play on the roll but don't flip to clean notation (turning an orchestral MIDI back into a readable score is a different, lossy problem).
Scores & credits
The keyboard pieces marked “hand-typed” were transcribed for this page (so they carry no third-party edition rights). The rest are public-domain or Creative-Commons MIDI files from the sources below — attribution kept as each licence requires.
On copyright & the public domain
Music can carry up to three separate copyrights, and a legal player has to respect whichever still apply:
- The composition (the notes). Protected for the composer's life plus 70 years in the US, UK and EU — long expired for everyone here, so the works are public domain. (That's not the same as “open source”; it just means free of copyright.)
- The sound recording (a performance). A modern recording has its own fresh copyright even when the work is public domain — irrelevant here, since nothing is played back; the sound is synthesised.
- The edition or MIDI file you start from. A particular engraving or someone's MIDI sequence can carry a thin copyright in that transcription. So either transcribe from a public-domain score yourself (the keyboard pieces) or use files explicitly released as PD/CC (the rest).
Good sources of genuinely free note data: the Mutopia Project and IMSLP (check each file's licence). If you swap in a real sampled instrument, mind the soundfont licence too — freely-licensed banks (FluidR3, GeneralUser GS, the Magenta soundfonts used here) are safe to redistribute; many commercial ones are not.