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Topic: Scanning Software for Music (Read 2836 times) previous topic - next topic

Scanning Software for Music

Scanning Software for Music
Check out http://ace.acadiau.ca/score/others.htm#Scan

It appears there are a number of programs available that will allow you to scan sheet music and save it to midi format. If this is the case, you should then be able to open the midi file in NWC and edit it.

I don't know if it works, but if anyone's interested, it's something you could try.

Re: Scanning Software for Music

Reply #1 –
We have tried using several of these programs to transcribe some Broadway shows and I can only say that they are a long way from being very useful. When you have a complex score, the programs have a hard time identifying all the notes, rests and other notation. When there are multi-note chords, for instance, it would often drop several of the notes. When a whole note is played over a quarter or eight rest, it would either ignore the whole note, or forget to add the rest which throws every off. I can only say that listening to the results of many of our attempts at transcription were pretty painful.

I have found that using a good keyboard to enter the notes myself actually is faster than trying to go back and change all the mistakes in an OCRed score.

OCR SHOULD be able to work well. Printed music is quite regular and shouldn't be that hard to interpret with scanning software. However, it appears that the programs are still a long way from being "good enough".

Jon

Re: Scanning Software for Music

Reply #2 –
I have tried the scanning/ocr in Finale, OMeR, and one other scanning program. All were equally useless. I had the same results, that is, faster to enter from scratch than to fix the numerous errors.

Changing scanning dpi, or music font size to be read did not seem to affect the results.
 

Re: Scanning Software for Music

Reply #3 –
SharpEye Music Reader does a very nice job for me, and the MIDI output is fine. However, there are three options for saving files from SharpEye -- native .mro format, MIDI, and NIFF.

NWC can read the MIDI output of SharpEye, but as with the other comments here the result in NWC is usually more work to correct than it would be to enter it from scratch.

NWC doesn't support NIFF (either variation) so that option is of little use.

The native .mro format is obviously of no use to NWC; however, it is plain text and relatively simple to parse. I had considered writing a converter from .mro to .nwc, but hit a major snag in that NoteWorthy won't release the file format for .nwc files. Unfortunate, since a score that took me almost 3 hours to transcribe manually took only 45 minutes to scan and clean up using SharpEye.

Bottom line -- until NWC supports NIFF, scanning is pretty much useless.