Which one is best is really an "it depends" type of answer. It depends on the repertoire you are scanning and your work style preferences. All of these programs have demos, so the best approach is to download the demos and see how well they work with your music. All the programs should work fine of relatively simple music, and have more trouble as the music gets more complex - particularly with counterpoint on a single staff, as in keyboard music.
Capella Scan 7
You will probably find it easiest to use the scanner to do the scanning, and then edit things further for an MP3 in another program. All four products export MusicXML files so you can easily use the results with other programs. PhotoScore has special export to Sibelius and capella-scan has special export to capella, in addition to the MusicXML export.
If your PDF is actually produced by a music notation program, you can get better results with PDFtoMusic Pro. It can take advantage of knowing that you have music fonts, lines, and other higher-level graphics rather than just having dots on a page from a scanner. If you have an optical scan, though, PDFtoMusic Pro can't work with it at all, so it's a more specialized tool.
The initial window you are presented with gives you options for bringing in your sheet music. Once selected, the file or scan is processed. This happened quite quickly for me on all three of the test PDFs.
Once you import a document, you have an interface with a menu bar, toolbar, side bar with thumbnail images of pages, and a main section with the original document on the left and the scan output on the right. You can change this to a vertical split with the original above and the scan below. You can now start to playback or edit.
There were a few basic procedures that are not built into editing that would be big time savers. One would be the ability to add or delete a dot to or from a note or rest. It is possible to change the basic duration of a note by clicking on the note in the scan (such as an eighth note) and then clicking on the duration you wish to change it to in the note palette (a sixteenth note), but you cannot add or remove a dot in a similar manner. You have to delete the note and input a new note with a dotted duration.
You can scan directly from the app or open PDF or TIFF files. For export, your choices are MusicXML, MIDI, PDF or MP3.A big plus is there are excellent tutorial videos on the Musitek website which are really helpful. The User Guide is well-written and very detailed; for this app you are going to need it.
Of all the apps in this review, SmartScore 64 Professional is only one, that, for most scores, you can go from scan or PDF all the way to a finished score and ready to print without exporting to a music notation software program. If you are going to be doing a lot of this type of work, you will have all the tools you need.
SmartScore 64 has a very high accuracy of recognition. If you are going to do a lot of this type of work, this app should be on your list to consider. This is a fully featured pro app with all the tools to take you from scan to clean complete scores, parts and playback all in one app.
The cleaned versions were revised to the point that I felt all editing best done in the scanning app had been done. The remaining notational elements either could not be produced in the scanning apps or could be created much more quickly in the music notation software.
My philosophy on tools is this: use the best one for the job. For example, lyric input is faster and more efficient in any of the music notation software apps than in the scanning apps, even though it can be done.
Hello Beth,If you send me two pages of your score, scanned in 300 dpi grayscale, I can do a test with Capella scan, to see if that works. (You can also try capella scan free for a month). Success!
What is your go-to sheet music scanning software? Right now what I've found is "capella scan" and "Neuratron Photoscore" for scanning. I think there's also Forte Notation but I have not been able to get a demo to download.
If it worked flawlessly, sure, scanning is always faster. But it rarely does, even with the best software, and the amount of time required to proofread and correct the errors is often more than. What it would take to enter from scratch. Not always, but often. Anyhow, ties and dynamics can be entered extremely quickly as welk, again, no piano skills required at all.
I just took a peek on shap eye and even though most of the scanned score been detected correctly, it's a drag to correct the few wrong things. I had tried a SATB brass piece arranged in a two sytem treble and bass score. Sometimes only one note was missing in a bar. But I didn't find an easy way to add it, if no rest had been provided. So I deleted the whole bar and typed in all the entries from scratch. In the end I had invested more time and the result had been a worse sheet compared with completely manual entry. But maybe I'm only missing some cue for the problem mentioned above.
Thank you, thats what I was looking for. Still quite a lot of steps but definitely better than everyting that I have tried before. So I have assigned a shortcut to that function. First time Musescore crashed when assigning the shortcut. But second attempt worked well. Knowing this I may have a chance to be qucker when editing a scanned score vs. typed in directly.
I got "capella scan" and it's fantastic. Takes PDFs and converts them to playable files. It's very intuitive after a few minutes on how to adjust those few things that don't get scanned correctly. There's always a few notes that need to be fixed but the indicators post-scan make most of them easy to find. And then there's a little midi piano from within the software that can play the song back so you can hear any mistakes. This program was much, much better than all the others I tried.
I use Sharpeye - its been around a long time, but works quite well for me. Need a decent quality copy to scan from, and you may need to adjust the scan settings to optimise the input. I'm usually scanning choral music and find, in general, it is quicker to scan and correct than enter from scratch. This is especially applicable if there is a piano part as well.
"you may need to adjust the scan settings to optimise the input"Indeed. I started using SharpEye in 2013, and it took me a long time to find the optimum settings. I now scan the page images as black and white TIFF files at 300 dpi, and the music recognition results are very good. Sometimes 100% correct, which for a multi-page choral work can save a lot of manual inputting.
Sounds good to me.Presumably, though, since one's goal is to sucessfully render a scanned score (or pdf) into MuseScore, attaching the scanned image along with the final MuseScore output to this thread would also seem appropriate.
As promised in my previous post, I have undertaken further tests. I'll spare you with lengthy explanations. In these tests I have scanned the same arrangement from the trombone chorale book with an Epson XP 830 scanner with different settings and partially reworked it. I attach the picture and the recognition result so that you can get an impression of the quality of the recognition and make your own judgement.The manufacturer contacted me again and asked me to share the detection result of SharpEye for comparison. Unfortunately I do not have access to SharpEye. Maybe there is someone in the forum who would like to share a detection result for the files I specified here.I will soon add another test with a trombone quartet I downloaded from the Kindle Store today.
The goal was perfect copy, so it was necessary to get the PRO version because that is the one which can export MusicXML (and has staff restrictions removed) for review and editing. Note that PlayScore2 plays the audio of what it has scanned and analyzed , while showing the scan (not the analyzed music).
What I have learned. The quality of the import is of the utmost importance. I started with using the iPad camera handheld. I switched to using a real camera and running the shots through GIMP to make them better; which was a lot of work. Then I bought a USB flatbed scanner, set it at grayscale 300 dpi, and that made a huge difference for the better. Even so, some scans are too light and I run them through GIMP using the strangely named 'erode' feature. Oh, and I had to learn GIMP too.
As for the worst cases, I mentioned before that the original documents should not be too light or have gaps in the staff brackets. In such cases you might find your measures (individually correct) scattered randomly among all the staffs in your score. Sometimes you can sort them out. The worst case is when the document doesn't scan at all -- for no apparent reason, although that is rare.
I too provide practice files for my choir. I agree that Playscore 2 provides excellent, but not quite perfect xml input to Musescore. My original input to Playscore 2 is not photographs but scans using Readdle's Scanner Pro app which I already had on my Ipad. It takes about 30 secs per page to scan and the app straightens the document automatically. I do a final check on straighteniing using the edges of the score rather than the page edges but this might be overegging it. I use Playscore 2 to pocess the scan and provide an XML file for input to Musescore for checking and editing.processes the scan
Hello to all of youPersonally I scan my scores with Neuratron PhotoScore full version and I am really very satisfied with it.It took me a while to master it and it is essential to adjust the exposure parameters properly.All my scores published on MuseScore (nearly 400) have been scanned on Photoscore and exported in XML to MuseScore. Even those with more than 20 staves per page.I would like to point out that I am not a musician and therefore cannot type with a midi keyboard connected to the computer.
PhotoScore is my app to go to when it takes too much time to copy the music notation manually. Just scan it as 300dpi black and white page for best results. Correct the inconsistencies and finally export as Music XML. 2ff7e9595c
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