Does anyone know anything about software that can read (and play) sheet music if it is in a pdf or image format and create an .mp3 file? I googled some to locate a few things and it's hard to tell what the quality is like.
What is the best Music Scanning Software?
(3 posts) (3 voices)-
ahankinson
MemberThe level of accuracy of any commercial OMR software is very poor for anything but the most simple and standard music notation. The current "state of the art" software is PhotoScore (http://www.neuratron.com/photoscore.htm). You can download and try a demo.
Donald Byrd has produced a paper comparing the output of many of the commercial applications. You can read it here: http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/donbyrd/MROMR2009Pap/OMREvaluation+Prospects4MROMR.doc
Good luck!
Posted 7 years ago Permalink -
The four main commercial music scanning products are:
- SmartScore
- PhotoScore
- capella-scan
- SharpEye Music ReaderThe first two run on Windows and Mac, the second two run on Windows only.
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.
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.
No current program works with handwritten music. You need to be working with printed music. PhotoScore has a limited handwritten capability but that requires you writing the music in a particular PhotoScore-friendly style.
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.
I hope this helps!
Posted 7 years ago Permalink
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