Missing Measure Numbers: Request for Sheet Music Software
For musicians who regularly use IMSLP (International Music Score Library Project), it’s clear how valuable the platform is. IMSLP provides free and immediate access to scores in the public domain, eliminating the need to wait for printed editions to arrive. While professionally printed editions offer superior quality and well-inspected notations, IMSLP lets you download the pieces you want almost instantly, which means you can sight-read new music with your chamber buddies without waiting for shipping or spending a single penny. Immediacy, however, comes at a cost: the quality of these scores varies significantly. For example, the same piece can look quite different depending on the publisher:
Really illegible scores are easy to avoid since each file comes with a user-submitted quality rating out of five stars. But even in the higher quality digital scores, there consistently lacks a fundamental feature: measure numbers.
Measure numbers are super useful! During sight-reading sessions, ensemble members inevitably become desynchronized from each other. When this happens, it’s helpful to have a point of reference for where you can start back up again. Without measure numbers, the group could stop playing, and a familiar scenario might unfold:
“Where are you guys? I’m at the end of the piece.”
“Oh…I’m in the middle of the last page.”
“So where should we start from?”
“Let’s do the section after the forte passage. That’s where we got unglued.”
“Which forte passage?*”
“Where the viola has that descending line.”
”I don’t think I know where that is.”
Don’t even get me started on the orchestral scenario where the conductor pauses conducting and says something like, “everyone count thirty-seven measures from the end,” just to avoid starting from the beginning, the spot that everyone reliably knows. With numbered measures, this inefficient exchange becomes “Let's start at measure 140.”
You may be wondering what could be wrong with starting from the beginning. Defaulting to the beginning of a piece creates two significant issues:
Time waste in rehearsals - it takes a long time to wait for everyone to count many measures accurately
Disproportionate practice distribution - early sections receive excessive attention while later passages remain underworked
Consider the parallel to memorizing text: starting from the beginning of a poem each time leads to diminishing returns. The opening becomes polished through repetition while later sections lag behind. Efficient music-learning benefits from the ability to isolate and address specific passages.
So what can you do if you still want to download free music, which may or may not come with measure numbers written in?
Here are some workarounds:
Manual counting and notation, i.e., counting each measure number and writing them in yourself (time-consuming, prone to errors)
Navigation by musical landmarks (inconsistent across parts; a significant articulation marking might exist in one instrument’s part but not in another’s.)
Using AI tools to identify measure numbers (high potential, murky execution…for now.)
Recently, I’ve tried using an intermediate method where I upload sheet music PDFs into Claude and ask it to give me the measure number of the first measure of every line, with mixed results.
The desired output should be:
Line 1: 1
Line 2: 6
Line 3: 14
etc.
What I need is software that processes sheet music files and outputs sheet music with measure numbers. The requirements:
PDF uploading
Musical structure analysis: essentially, the ability to define where measures and lines begin and end
Measure number insertion
Clean PDF output
These functionalities would eliminate the need for imprecise verbal directions during rehearsals and allow musicians to focus on interpretation rather than navigation. On the other hand, I could always try to improve my counting skills.
*Sometimes, musicians use significant dynamic markings as places to start rehearsing. Of course, this relies on some intuition or understanding the musician has, upon first reading, that the dynamic marking they are pointing out is significant enough across the entire piece that it could be common across all of the parts, not just, say, in the violin part.
