Built by a
Choir Director

The Problem

If you've ever managed sheet music for a choir, orchestra, band, or church, you know the pain: scores scattered across filing cabinets, binders, and folders on someone's laptop. A spreadsheet tracking who has what, except it's always out of date. Rehearsal night arrives and three people don't have their parts. Nobody can find the arrangement you used two seasons ago.

That was my life as a choir director. I tried spreadsheets, shared drives, forScore, and general-purpose inventory tools. None of them were built for how musicians actually work with sheet music.

Why I Built MusicLib

My name is Thomas McCarthy. I'm a choir director and software developer, and I built MusicLib because I needed it myself. I wanted one place where I could catalog every score in our library (digital and physical), search by composer, voicing, or even lyrics inside a PDF, track who has which copies checked out, build setlists for upcoming concerts, and share it all with my ensemble without giving everyone admin access to a spreadsheet.

Nothing like that existed. So I built it.

The Philosophy

Purpose-built for sheet music. MusicLib isn't a file manager or a generic inventory app with a music skin. It understands scores, parts, voicings, collections, setlists, and the workflows that music librarians and directors actually use every day.

Works for one person or two hundred. Whether you're an individual musician organizing your personal collection or a university music department with hundreds of students, MusicLib scales from a personal library to a full institutional system with role-based permissions, checkout tracking, and shared access.

Your data is yours. Export your entire library at any time as a .musiclib backup file. Import from CSV, forScore, or other tools. No lock-in. If you ever leave, you take everything with you.

What Makes MusicLib Different

• OCR search: find scores by searching text inside PDFs, including lyrics, markings, and annotations
• Checkout & reservation tracking: know who has which scores, when they're due, and what's overdue
• Physical copy tracking: manage your physical inventory alongside digital scores, with checkout tracking and due dates
• Cross-platform: access MusicLib from any web browser or the native iOS app for iPad and iPhone, all kept in sync
• forScore integration: import .4sb backups and export .4ss setlists
• Institution management: role-based access for students, volunteers, directors, and admins