Frequently Asked Questions

Registration and membership

Q: What is the difference between Silver and Gold memberships?

A: With the Gold membership you have unlimited access to download and print/listen to all the files in the search engine (currently 2249 pieces).
Silver members only have access to a brief selection of pieces. Regarding forum and chat there is no difference between the two types of memberships except that it is thanks to the Gold members the site can exist, grow and remain free from advertisement.

Q: Other websites charge $3 or more for a single piece but you are saying I get over 2000 pieces for this price, and the quality of your files is far better than what I have seen anywhere else. What is the hook?

A: There is no hook, just a friendly business concept effectively utilizing the Internet for product distribution. We do not charge you for the actual files. The small fee is there to cover our administrational costs and to make it possible to constantly improve the website with new content and services.

Q: If I sign up for a monthly Gold subscription, do I have to make a payment every month?

A: The fee is automatically charged every month from your credit card or PayPal account until you cancel the subscription.

Q: Can I cancel the subscription at any time or do I need to pay for a certain number of months?

A: You can cancel at any time - even during the first month - and your automatical payments will stop imediately.

Q: Can I become a Gold member even if I have no credit card?

A: Yes, sign up for a free Silver membership and send us an email (customerservice@pianostreet.com) requesting info about other payment alternatives.

Q: How do I upgrade my Silver membership to a Gold membership?

A: Log in to your Silver account and scroll down to the Upgrade Membership section on the "my account" page to select your prefered upgrade options. For more info about the Gold membership and payment options, see the Sign-up page.

Q: How do I cancel my monthly Gold membership?

A: Just log in to your PayPal or WorldPay control panel and cancel the subscription.
(Please note that your login details there are necessarily not the same as for your Piano Street account.)
Alternatively, reply to one of the email payment notifications and ask for cancellation.

The payments will be cancelled immediately but your Gold account will remain active until the end of the current billing cycle. Please notify us if you want your account deleted immediately. Otherwise your account will be downgraded to a free Silver membership 30 days after your last payment.

Sheet music

Q: Why can I not view or print any of your sheet music files? I can only save the file but not open it.

A: You need to have Adobe Reader installed on your computer. Download it for free here.

Q: I have Adobe Reader installed. Why do I only see a white blank page when opening the sheet music files?

A: Many of the files are very large so depending on your Internet connection and the performance of your computer it can take from a few seconds up to several minutes before you see the sheet music. If you have a slow Internet connection we recommend you to right click on the file link and select "Save target as..." to download it to your computer before opening the file.
If this does not help, have a look at the Adobe Support page regarding this issue.

Q: Why are your files so large? They take very long time to download.

A: Since we are concerned about providing you top quality sheet music our scanned sheets are of very high resolution. This makes the files large but we hope you will think it is worth the extra minutes of download time to be able to enjoy the great quality during many hours of practice.

Q: Is your sheet music legal?

A: Yes, the music we provide is in the public domain.
However, the sheet music files are protected by copyright and is only for personal use by the Piano Street member who has printed them out.

Q: Can I print out copies to my piano pupils or friends?

A: No. Instead we try to keep our membership fees minimal to allow anyone to afford a Gold membership.

Q: I have a free membership but can not download any sheet music at all. Why am I sent back to the free sheet music list when I try to download the free files?

A: You are experiencing this because your free memebership has expired. You need to renew your membership by ordering the free Silver membership from the "Upgrade membership" section at the bottom of the "my account" page when logged in.
This is because you signed up during the very early days of Piano Street and we now have a new agreement that you need to accept.

Recordings

Q: I find a lot of sheet music but very few recordings of the pieces. Why don't you have recordings of all pieces?

A: First of all, we started building up the resource of sheet music in the beginning of 2005 but just recently started producing recordings.
Our main focus is now to cover the common intermediate repertoire which is often not widely available on CD:s (such as Sonatinas, Inventions, little Minuets etc) in order to provide a qualitative and artistic alternative to MIDI files (computer/synthesiser recordings) you can find everywhere on the Internet.
Producing professional acoustic recordings is neither a fast nor cheap process so it will take some time before the number of recordings will catch up on the number of sheets.

Q: How do you make the recordings? Any digital pianos or MIDI involved?

A: No, just plain recordings of acoustic performances by professional musicians on Steinways model B or D.

Piano Forum and Chat

Q: I am logged in to my Silver account but when I visit the forum or chat I appear to be logged out. How can I get logged there as well?

A: The forum and chat membership is not automatically activated when signing up for the Silver membership. You need to activate it at the "Upgrade membership" section on the "my account" page. There are no fees involved and the activation is instant.