About
Data Sources & Licences
The 15 open data sources behind this site, what we take from each, and how their licences are honoured.
| Source | What we use | Records | Licence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia | intro text, lead images and Wikidata IDs for instruments and concepts | 378 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
| Wikidata | instrument classification, inventors, notable players and the clarinet repertoire | 2,932 | CC0 1.0 |
| Wikimedia Commons | image files, authors and licences for instrument and composer pictures | 747 | Per-file (CC BY, CC BY-SA, PD) |
| MusicBrainz | instrument types, descriptions and alternative names | 47 | CC0 (core data) |
| Wikipedia (composers) | biographical summaries for composers of the woodwind repertoire | 295 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
| Open Opus | composer epochs and catalogue of works mentioning wind instruments | 1,534 | CC BY-SA (data) |
| IMSLP / Petrucci Music Library | free scores for solo winds, duets, sonatas and concertos | 5,572 | Public domain & CC (per score) |
| The Mutopia Project | engraved public-domain scores with PDF, MIDI and LilyPond sources | 691 | Public domain / CC BY / CC BY-SA |
| The Session | popular traditional tunes with ABC notation | 120 | ODbL / member transcriptions |
| Europeana (incl. MIMO) | historic instruments from European museums | 223 | Open licences only (CC0, CC BY, CC BY-SA, PDM) |
| Smithsonian Open Access | instruments from the National Museum of American History | 0 | CC0 |
| The Metropolitan Museum of Art | public-domain wind instruments from the Met's musical instruments department | 28 | CC0 (Open Access images) |
| Cleveland Museum of Art | musical instruments with open-access images and curatorial notes | 80 | CC0 |
| Internet Archive | 78 rpm recordings and pre-1927 method books | 231 | Public domain / per item |
| OpenAlex | open-access research papers on wind-instrument acoustics and pedagogy | 161 | CC0 (metadata) |
| Openverse | freely licensed recordings of each instrument from Wikimedia Commons | 129 | Creative Commons (per file) |
How licences are honoured
- Wikipedia text excerpts are credited on every page where they appear and remain under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- Wikimedia Commons images show author and licence in their caption, linking to the file page.
- Museum images are used only when the institution marks them open access (CC0 / public domain) or under an open licence shown on the object page.
- Scores and recordings are linked at their source, never re-hosted.
- Wikidata, MusicBrainz core data, OpenAlex and Smithsonian Open Access are CC0.
Data is refreshed by re-running the open-source scraper; requests are cached and rate-limited to be polite to these volunteer and public services.