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Comment by dc2k08 | Hacker News Reader

Sheet music is the worst. I was told, using an online sheet music service, that I was allowed to print the sheet music I had purchased once only and using software I had to install which was developed especially to force this. If the print job failed I would have to repurchase the sheet music. I could not buy a digital copy and print it as often as I liked. When I questioned this policy I was told it was out of their hands, that it was the only model of online distribution that the sheet music cartel or whoever it was would agree to.

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would it accept to print on a pdf 'printer' ?

I am sure you have thought of this already, but [Alt]+[PrtScn] -> Paste -> print

I bet there's no preview. But you may fool the DRM with a virtual printer driver that actually saves a PDF. Maybe…

I think this was it. They also allowed you to change the key of the piece before you printed so this is where a digital score is shown to be far superior to a piece of paper but if you want it in every key then they want you to pay them twelve times. No thanks.

(If you're running Windows) Microsoft's XPS Document Writer is pretty good for this. It results in a .xps file but you can do whatever you want with that afterwards, including PDF conversion.

Unfortunately, many pieces are longer so they fit on more than one page. Of course, one motivated enough could still print screen each page. Even easier on a Mac where you can select a rectangle to print screen from with Cmd+Shift+4.

Some software has been developed to prevent print screening. I've also seen the web variant of this, to prevent you from doing right click - Open image in new tab. Used on some of those funny images sharing sites.

If all else fails, run in a virtual machine to make your screen shots.

or copy machine

http://pdfpirate.org/

Print ==> Scan ==> Hypothetical Sheet Music OCR Algorithm ===> MIDI file.

Now there's a thought...

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