| A–G | add that note, nearest octave |
| 0 or R | rest |
| 1–7 | note length, shortest to longest: 64th · 32nd · 16th · eighth · quarter · half · whole (5 = quarter, as in MuseScore) |
| T | triplet: three in the time of two |
| Q | grace note: small, slashed, before the next note |
| . | dotted on/off |
| Shift+A–G | stack a chord note on the last note |
| N | mouse input: point at the staff, click to place. Rest (or 0) then hands the pointer a rest instead of a note — press it again for notes. Esc puts the tool away |
Durations stick for the next notes you type, and also reshape the note behind the cursor. Each note lands in the octave nearest the previous one — so a rising pattern keeps climbing. Shift+↓ brings it down an octave.
| ↑ ↓ | up / down a semitone |
| Shift+↑↓ | up / down an octave |
| # − = | sharp · flat · natural |
| H | fermata (hold) |
| ' > _ ^ | staccato · accent · tenuto · marcato |
| O | ornament: trill → turn → mordent → off |
| M | dynamics: p → mp → mf → f → ff → pp |
| , | hairpin from the note before: cresc → dim → off |
| K | chord symbol (G7, Dm, B♭…) over the note |
| L | lyric under the note (current verse); Enter moves on; end a syllable with - to hyphenate |
| V | switch to the next voice (SATB, piano) |
| S | slur this note to the one before it |
| X | cross-staff: draw on the other piano staff |
| P | pedal: Ped. → ✱ → off |
| ⌫ | delete the note behind the cursor |
These act on the note just left of the blue cursor — the one shown in blue. With a selection (Shift+→), they act on every selected note at once: lengths, accidentals, ↑↓, articulations, ornaments, triplets, grace notes — and S slurs the whole run, , puts one hairpin under it. One Ctrl+Z undoes the lot.
| ← → | step the cursor |
| Home End | start / end of the score |
| click | put the cursor beside any note |
| Shift+←→ | select a run of notes |
| Ctrl+A | select this whole voice |
| Ctrl+C X V | copy · cut · paste at the cursor |
| click a bar | select that whole measure; Shift+click selects a run |
| Delete | with measures selected: take those bars out of every voice |
Measures… in the Edit group adds empty bars — as many as you ask for, at the end or in between. An empty bar fills up as you write into it, so the score keeps the shape you gave it.
| Space | play from the cursor / stop |
| ⏮ | start over — play again from the top |
| Hear | every note sounds as you type, click, or shift it — this button quiets that |
| Ctrl+Z / Y | undo / redo anything |
| Ctrl+S | save to a file |
| Ctrl+O | open a file |
| Ctrl+P | print / save as PDF |
CopperNote does not read music from a picture. No program reads handwriting reliably, and the ones that read printed music leave you correcting their guesses. So this does the honest thing instead: it puts the page you are copying from on screen beside the staff, and you type the music in once.
Source opens that pane. Give it a photo of your manuscript, a scan, or a PDF — and straighten a crooked photo with tilt, or push ink up when faint pencil will not read. − and + magnify the page as far as you need, on a PDF as well as a photograph. Drag the divider to share the screen how you like. What you open stays there until you clear it, so a six-page manuscript can take six evenings.
Once it is in, it is music and not a picture: it plays back, transposes, prints at any size, exports to MusicXML, and still opens in twenty years. That is the whole point of typing it once.
Coming from another program? If the music is already in MuseScore, Finale, Sibelius or anything else that writes MusicXML, export it as MusicXML or .mxl and open it here — that arrives as real notes you can edit. A photograph or a scan does not, which is what the pane is for.
Formats. The pane shows PNG, JPG, WebP, GIF and PDF, plus MusicXML and .cnote scores for comparing side by side. It cannot show HEIC (what an iPhone saves by default) or TIFF (what many scanners save) — nothing in a browser can. Re-save those as JPG or PDF.
The toolbar is yours: drag a group’s ⋮ grabber to put the groups in any order, ends included ·
Press Esc or click anywhere to close ·
Music notation that lives in one file, works offline, and never asks for an account. Your scores stay yours.
Every line of music is a voice: a singer's part, a hand of the piano, an instrument of its own. The list is the score, top to bottom — drag ⋮⋮ to move a voice and its music where you drop it (onto another voice's row = join that staff). Names print beside the first system.
Empty measures wait for you: write into one and it fills up instead of pushing the rest of the score along. Bars are added to every voice at once, so the parts always agree about where bar 12 is.