Birdland-Qt Musician's Assistant - Qt Lite VersionBirdland is a multimedia music viewer and library manager for music books in PDF form with specific attention to fakebooks. It displays a page of music by searching a database of titles and other metadata. It also displays non-indexed PDF files but without metadata searching. Birdland ships with index data from 9 sources covering over 100 books and over 20,000 titles.
Answering the Let's hear how it goes question, search results also include links to audio files, MIDI files, ChordPro files, and JJazzLab songs from your media library, and and relevant YouTube videos.
Birdland Qt Lite supercedes a prior version of Birdland released in 2022. That version only ran on Linux, had a cumbersome installation, and the user interface was based on the PySimpleGui library, which had licensing issues and is now discontinued.
Birdland is a cross-platform application that runs on Windows, MacOS, and Linux. It is distributed as self-contained packages with minimal host dependencies. The user interface was completely rewritten using the Qt library, the internal architecture was restructured, and a many of the internals were rewritten. It also includes a small number of new features but is otherwise similar to the 2022 version.
Birdland does not include any media (fake books, audio files, MIDI files, ChordPro files, etc.) Such media is available from many online sources, which is for you to discover.
The current version is designated as Lite because the Index Management tools are not yet included.
Documentation
Birdland is documented in several items in the sidebar:| File | Description |
|---|---|
| Quick-Start Guide | Essentials needed to get started with Birdland. Up-to-date with Birdland-Qt Lite. |
| Configuration Guide | Describes each configuration option. Up-to-date with Birdland-Qt Lite. |
| Documentation | Comprehensive description of Birdland but based on a prior version Birdland 2000. Much is applicable; discussion of Index Management Tools is not. |
Birdland 2000 links to the older version of Birdland. It runs only on Linux but may be of interest for the Index Management tools, which are not currently in Birdland-Qt.
Index Search Here you can search the Birdland Music Book Index to find books and page numbers by song title and by other search terms. You can use this to explore the Birdland Index prior to installation or for searching fake books independent of Birdland.
Download
© Bill Wetzel 2025