The first 15 CD-ROMs, which include the complete piano solos of Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Mozart, Schumann and others, showed up in music stores this month. By the end of 2002, the company plans to sell a series of 110 disks. We're giving people the opportunity to have it in their own home. It also enables searching and browsing by a composer's name or a score's title. The software can be used on either Windows or Macintosh computers.
Sheet music is offered on-line by other companies.
But searching through the archives on free music sites can sometimes be cumbersome, and finding rare works is unlikely. Those are two problems that the Theodore Presser Co. hopes to rectify with its CD-ROMs, which use a simple interface that enables users to click on titles in a table of contents and immediately view the music in printable form. They do not include any sound files or interactive graphics. They do, however, enable users to print as many sheets as they want. Broido said he expected that piano teachers, for example, might buy the CDs and print sheet music for students to sample.