Everything you need to write music

A touch-first, magnetic drag-and-drop editor that runs in any modern browser — iPad, Android tablet, Chromebook, laptop, or desktop. No installs, no plugins. Editing needs a tablet-sized screen or larger, because that is the smallest screen a full system of music fits on legibly. A real touch editor with no download is the gap in music notation software today, and it is the one we built StaffWeaver to close.

Dotted rhythms, automatic beaming, ties, slurs, tuplets, articulations, chords of up to six notes, two independent voices per staff, and per-measure key and time changes — handled the way a copyist would handle them. Every measure you edit stays musically valid as you work, so you never end up with a score that does not add up. When the piece outgrows the bars you started with, Add measure — or +4 — extends the score in place.

A Lyrics mode types syllables straight onto notes — hyphens land automatically between split words, and holding a syllable across notes draws the melisma extender line choral scores expect. A Chords mode puts Cmaj7, G7/B, or F#m7b5 above the staff with proper sharp and flat glyphs. Both import from MusicXML too.

Dynamics from pp to ff, sf, and crescendo/diminuendo hairpins change how loud playback really sounds — not just how the page looks. 1st/2nd endings, D.C. and D.S. al Fine/al Coda render as brackets and signs above the staff, and the playhead follows them exactly the way a performer would.

Scores save to your account automatically as you edit — open them from any browser you sign into, organized in one library, with multi-score tabs for working across pieces, an undo history 30 steps deep for the session you are in, and offline drafts that sync back the moment you reconnect.

Signed in, the community library is a shelf of scores other StaffWeaver users have published — search by title, composer or publisher, filter by category, and sort by most recent, top rated or most imported. Import one and it is copied into your own account as a new score you can edit, print and export like anything else; an import counts against your plan’s saved-score limit the same way a score you wrote does. Rate a score one to five stars once you have imported it — a rating comes from someone who actually took the piece, not from a passer-by — and report anything that does not belong. Publishing your own is a Publish button on the score row in My scores: choose a category and the publisher display name you want to appear under, and it is in the library; unpublish and it comes straight back out, while copies people already imported stay in their accounts. StaffWeaver seeds the shelf itself, publishing public-domain repertoire under the name StaffWeaver Library, every one of those scores carrying its source and public-domain statement where a reader can see it — that collection is small today and growing, so we would rather describe it than quote you a number that will be wrong next month. Browsing, importing and rating are free on every plan and cost no credits; publishing your own is part of Premium. Two boundaries, stated plainly because they are the ones that would disappoint you later. The library is account-only: it lives behind your login, there are no public community pages for a search engine to index, and a score of yours is in it only if you published it. And you publish your own work, or music you can account for. A score you built in the editor, or one the AI assistant wrote from your prompt, goes up as it is. A PDF you scanned or a MusicXML file you imported needs a provenance statement first — a sentence or two saying what the source was, when it was published if you know, and why you may share it — which is then stored with the publication and shown to everyone who opens it, under your publisher name. We do not verify that statement and do not claim to: nothing here can tell whose music a scan is, and you are the only person who knows. Scores imported from the community library cannot be published again at all. This shelf is a library attached to a notation editor rather than a place to re-post other people’s sheet music; if you would rather a person looked at your public-domain edition before you publish it, email support@staffweaver.com.

Moving from Finale, Sibelius, MuseScore, Dorico, or another editor? Upload a .xml, .musicxml, or .mxl file straight from your dashboard — free on every plan, parsed right in your browser, honest about anything it had to simplify. Transposition declared in the file is read correctly, so imported band parts stay in the right key. One stated limit so nothing surprises you: an import file can be up to 5 MB.

Your scores are not locked in. The editor’s Export button downloads any score as MusicXML 4.0 — .musicxml, or compressed .mxl — checked against the official MusicXML 4.0 schema, in the interchange format MuseScore, Finale, Sibelius, Dorico, and Noteflight all import. Free on every plan, no credits, and it runs entirely in your browser: transposing parts go out in written pitch with the right key signature and a declared transposition, and lyrics, chord symbols, dynamics, slurs, tuplets, repeats and voltas travel with them. If anything in a particular score cannot fit in a MusicXML file, StaffWeaver tells you before the download instead of dropping it silently.

Upload a PDF, PNG, or JPEG of printed music — up to 15 MB and 10 pages — and the AI sheet music scanner reads notes and rhythms into an editable score in your account, flagging the measures it was unsure about. Set your expectations from measurement rather than marketing: on real published lead sheets our own evaluation puts note recognition at a mean F1 of 0.34, against 0.825 on clean synthetic test pages. In plain terms, a scan of a real page comes back with a lot wrong. So this is an assistive first draft, not a transcription service — what makes it worth doing is the next section, where you finish it.

The correction workflow is the actual product. Review Mode puts the original scanned page beside the imported score, aligned measure by measure, and walks you through every flagged spot: confirm the ones that are right, hit Make triplet where the scanner mis-split a run of three, or press Ask AI on a single measure to get a proposed correction you can Apply or Dismiss. Free structural checks catch problems the moment the score lands; an optional AI review pass reads each page more deeply. Fixing a page here is faster than retyping it from a photo — which is the honest bar a scan has to clear.

The mistakes that wreck a rehearsal are rarely wrong notes — they are a repeat that never closes, a second ending nobody bracketed, a D.S. al Coda with no Coda to jump to. The editor’s Proofread panel finds those, free, on the score you have open. 10 structural checks run over your repeat signs, your ending brackets, your D.S., D.C., To Coda and Fine marks, and your tuplet brackets; each finding is a plain sentence naming the bar and saying what playback will do about it, and clicking it puts your cursor in that measure. It re-checks on every edit, so a finding disappears the moment you fix it, and it blocks nothing — a score with an unmatched repeat still plays, saves, prints and exports. When it finds nothing it says so and lists what it looked at, rather than showing you a blank. It runs in your browser: no credits, no upload, no waiting. Where it stops is printed on the panel itself, because a proofreader you cannot trust is worse than none: the free checks read structure and navigation only, and do not check harmony, instrument ranges, note spelling, or engraving. Everything they report is exact — a fact about the page, found by the same engine that plays your score back.

Reading the music is a different job from reading the page, so it is a different button and a different list. Check with AI sends the open score to a model and returns its suggestions under their own AI suggestions heading, in four kinds: Voice leading, Instrument range, Note spelling and Engraving. Every suggestion names a bar and clicking it puts your cursor in that bar, the same navigation the free findings use, and every one carries the confidence the model itself stated. Nothing runs automatically: it costs 100 credits a run, the price is on the button before you press it, a failed run is refunded, and "nothing to suggest" is a real answer the panel shows as a result rather than a blank. And it is labelled for what it is, on the panel, above the first row: these are opinions, not rules — a suggestion here can be confidently wrong, so check it against the score before you act on it. That separation is deliberate. Merging a model’s opinion into the free tier’s list of facts would let the first wrong suggestion you disprove take the structural checks down with it, so the two are kept apart in wording, in heading, and in what each one claims about itself.

The built-in AI Score Chat starts with a blank page, not with your existing work. Ask it for a new score — "start a melody for me" is one of its own opening suggestions — and it creates one with the title, clef, and time signature you asked for, opens it, and writes into it. From there it has more than twenty score-editing tools: place and remove notes, build chords, add or remove parts, set keys, meters, dynamics, lyrics, chord symbols, tuplets, repeats and tempo. Every change lands right on the staff, one Undo away, charged per message in credits.

Sampled-instrument playback with per-part instruments, mute, and solo — hear a score the moment you finish writing it, with the playhead following along in the notation, honoring your dynamics, repeats, and endings.

A slide-up piano keyboard with sound — tap a key and a note lands in the score at the cursor, at the right pitch and the active duration, ready for the next tap. Two octaves are on screen at once with arrows to shift the window up or down, and a Chord toggle stacks each key you tap onto the selected note, building a chord instead of a run of separate notes. Great on a tablet, or any time you already know the notes by ear.

Multi-part scores with real instrument identities. Start a new score by choosing a group — Concert Band, Jazz Band, Orchestra, Marching Band, or an SATB, SSA or SAB choir — and the whole ensemble loads in that ensemble’s own score order, bracketed by section, before you have picked a single instrument by hand; or build one part at a time from a 34-instrument catalog grouped by family, bassoon, euphonium, timpani and percussion among them. Either way the count steppers add and remove parts before you create. The choir voicings use real Soprano, Alto, Tenor and Bass parts, so the tenor line reads treble and sounds an octave below and the bass line reads bass clef. Assign a B♭ trumpet, alto sax, or horn in F to any part later. Each part renders and prints in the pitch the player actually reads, with correctly transposed key signatures and a one-click toggle to concert (sounding) pitch for the conductor. Rename and reorder parts freely, and add member seats so a band, choir, or orchestra can work from a shared library.

Switch the editor from the full score to any one part and see just that player’s music — its own line breaks, its own written pitch, and the navigation marks a player still needs, with the part name printed above the title. Group brackets and grand-staff braces render at the left edge of every system — the section brackets an ensemble group brings with it, and any that come through from an imported MusicXML file — so a score reads like a score.

Printing is where browser notation tools usually give themselves away, so we rebuilt it. Every system is its own box on the page: page one starts with music instead of a wasted blank sheet, and no system gets chopped in half by a page break — it moves to the next page whole. A tie or slur that runs from one system into the next, including across a page break, is engraved the way a copyist engraves it: two half-curves, one closing at the end of the first line and one opening at the start of the next, instead of a phrase mark cut off at the paper edge. Print the whole score with its title and composer header, or switch to a single part and print that instead, straight from the browser.