Welcome to Arkkra Enterprises

Hi. We are John and Bill. Years ago, as musicians and computer programmers, we decided to write a music publication program for our own use. We wanted something that could handle almost any kind of music, and produce professional-looking results, yet be quick and easy to use. The result is a program called Mup. We used it for hundreds of our own songs, and when other people expressed interest in getting a copy of Mup, we set up the arkkra.com website in 1995 to make Mup available as shareware. In 2012, after 17 years of adding features, we decided to make it open-source software that is available for free to everyone. It is our hope that this will enable and encourage many more people to use it, and make it possible to include Mup unencumbered in Linux distributions that otherwise would not include it. It is already included in the repositories of several Linux distributions, including Fedora and ArchLinux.

We invite you to read some of the comments we have received from Mup users from around the world.

Mup takes a text file as input and produces very high quality PostScript output for printed music. It can handle both regular notation and tablature notation. It can also produce MIDI output. It comes with a program called Mupmate that provides a menu-driven interface and integrated editor, but it can also be used in command line mode. It has been in use for music publication since 1992, and is used by musicians all over the world, including music departments at Stanford, Johns Hopkins, the University of Virginia, and other major universities. It is now available in Version 7.1, which was released in 2023. We provide ready-to-run versions for Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS X, and Linux x86. Source code is also available, so even if we don't have a ready-to-run version for your system, you can probably still run Mup (you will just need a C compiler in that case). Either way, you can download Mup Version 7.1 and try it out right away.

Information about the Mup music publication program

• Summary of Mup features
• Overview of Mup
• Quick tutorial of Mup basics
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Downloading a copy of Mup to try out for yourself
• Comments from Mup users
• New features of Mup Version 7.1 (and previous versions)
• Sample Mup input file
• Sample Mup output
• Another sample Mup input file
• Sample Mup output
• Template Mup input file
• Music available for downloading
• Mup User's Guide (web-based version)
• Mup User's Guide
• Mup Quick Reference
• Mup for blind users
• Mup License
• Programs donated by Mup users
• Requests for new features
• Other things from the authors of Mup
• Links to other interesting sites

We'd like to hear your comments about Mup. If you feel Mup doesn't currently meet all your needs or if you have any problems with downloading, installing, or using Mup, please let us know at

Apple and Mac OS X are registered trademarks of Apple, Inc.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.
Microsoft and Windows are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corp.
PostScript is a registered trademark of Adobe Systems Inc.
Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.