Contribution guide
Accepted formats
| Sheet music, documents | PDF preferred — one file for the whole piece, not one image per page. |
| Photos, magazine/catalog pages | JPG or PNG. A single high-resolution scan beats several low-resolution ones. |
| Video | MP4 (H.264) if you're digitizing yourself. Whatever a transfer service gives you is usually fine as-is. |
| Audio | MP3 or WAV. FLAC is welcome if you have it — it won't be rejected for size, see below. |
Scanning advice
- A flatbed scanner beats a phone photo when one's available — even a phone scanning app (most have a "document" or "flatten" mode) is a big step up from a plain photo of a page.
- For a multi-page document, scan it as one PDF, not a series of separate image files — most scanner software and phone scanning apps do this automatically.
- 300 DPI is a reasonable default for text and photos; go higher (600 DPI) for anything with fine detail worth preserving, like hand-annotated sheet music.
- Scan the whole page, including margins — trimming can cut off dates, stamps, or handwritten notes that turn out to matter.
- If something is fragile, a photograph in good, even light is better than risking damage on a scanner bed.
Uploading
Every contribution form lets you either upload a file directly (up to 100MB) or paste a link to one hosted elsewhere (Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.) — uploading is usually simpler, and it means the file lives with the rest of the archive rather than depending on an outside link staying alive. If a file is over 100MB, a link is the only option.
What happens after you submit
Everything goes through a review queue before it's published — a moderator checks it over, and either publishes it or reaches out if something's unclear. Once your first submission is approved, you're automatically promoted from a plain account to a contributor. Sheet music you submit is routed into the medium's shared community library at first; once you've had a number of arrangements approved in a given medium, further contributions there go into a library of your own.