Among other factors, high complexity and mandatory expert computer knowledge make many music IR and music analysis systems unsuitable for the majority of largely computer-illiterate musicologists. The JRing system offers highly flexible yet intuitively usable search and comparison operations. to aid musicologists during score analysis. This paper discusses the requirement analysis that led to JRing’s inception, its IR tools and graphical user interface plus the kind of musical material it works on and the Humdrum-based technical realization of IR operations. 1 USER NEEDS JRing was conceived as set of tools to assist musicologists during that kind of score analysis which aims at: • a score in which all musicologically relevant elements are completely marked up • a catalogue which contains all occurrences of all of these elements in complete form plus an arbitrary set of annotations Depending on the type of work and / or analysis, the elements could be themes, leitmotivs or sets. ...