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Topic: New Music OCR Program (Read 10355 times) previous topic - next topic

New Music OCR Program

Like some other folks, I tried Midiscan for a while, and was a bit underwhelmed.

Happened to run across a new shareware program, however, that appears to be fairly accurate and easy to use (at least compared to Midiscan). It is called Sharpeye. A fully functional trial version can be downloaded at http://www.visiv.co.uk/. I doubt it would be suitable for sophisticated works, but I found that it converted scans of my NWC pieces (including lyrics) almost flawlessly. [Author's note: that may reflect the sophistication of my work]. It even did a creditable job with a marginal copy of music I scanned.

In any event, some folks out there might want to download and play with it. For the true programmers, the developer has even included code notes.

See also msg #485 msg #555, msg #603, msg #861 msg #1111 for other discussions of music OCR efforts and programs.

Re: New Music OCR Program

Reply #1 –
Thx for the info.
I'll try Sharpeye ( http://www.visiv.co.uk/ ) asap.

Other links you specified in this forum are accessible via are https://forum.noteworthycomposer.com/?topic=391 , https://forum.noteworthycomposer.com/?topic=454 , https://forum.noteworthycomposer.com/?topic=496 , https://forum.noteworthycomposer.com/?topic=726 and https://forum.noteworthycomposer.com/?topic=951 ; do not forget to specifiy the '!' before submiiting an http or item number URL :-)

Note: SharpEye 1.08 is 1.1 Mb

Re: New Music OCR Program

Reply #2 –
I was wondering why the links weren't working . . . Guess I should check out the "help" files every now and then. Thanks for the tip!

P.S. Quick add on to prior message. One cannot "print" from Sharpeye (another program which integrates Sharpeye apparently does that). However, it still may be useful in producing a workable midi from a scan.

Re: New Music OCR Program

Reply #3 –
I haven't experimented before with OCR scanning for music files. Friends of mine have and, like Steve, were underwhelmed. Since I recently purchased a scanner, I thought I'd give Sharpeye a trial. I must say that I'm rather impressed. I scanned single and multiple line parts and found virtually no errors. Even when exporting the scanned file as a midi and then opening it in NWC, I found very few errors. The horror stories I've heard about the amount of editing required when working with this type of software don't seem to apply to Sharpeye. I'd highly recommend that you all give it a try.

Re: New Music OCR Program

Reply #4 –
Odd -- I tried SharpEye on three scans, and it failed miserably on all of them. Two used an older form of eighth notes, with a slanting straight sided flag, and it wouldn't recognize them at all. The other used more normal notes, and was a clean scan, but many notes were missed altogether, no accidentals were found, and most chords were missing all but one or two notes.

I just uninstalled it.

Cyril

Re: New Music OCR Program

Reply #5 –
I suspect there will always be some limitations on OCR. If folks run into a problem, they may want to play with resolution (300x300dpi is standard; the program can also use 400x400), or brightness and contrast. The "help" menu gives some pointers in these areas.

Anyway, the program just seemed to work better than Midiscan, so thought I would note it for others to try.

Re: New Music OCR Program

Reply #6 –
Well, I tried it also, with a file I had previously scanned.
It's from DonGiovanni, duet between DG and Zerlina (La ci darem la mano).
As I scanned this by hand and saved it into compressed tif, the 1st trouble I had was that image was no correctly read; I had to convert it into .bmp to be able to read it. After this, the conversion was rather long (I use a 486dx2/66 with Win95, 32Mb), but finally got a result rather good (much better than MidiScan who doesn't like a variable number of staves).

The good points I see in it are:
- lyrics are recognized quite correctly, and you may get them from the NIFF file;
- the GUI is nice in one point: left-clicking in the main window makes moving the image in its window, with a '+' cursor on it moving in real-time. Very useful to add/correct items that were not recognized. But CapellaScan is much better on this part (it superimposes both), though much less cheap...

It may be useful for people who can't stand midiscan no more...

HTH

Re: New Music OCR Program

Reply #7 –
I tried it to scan in Beethoven piano sonatas. It did an excellent job translating the TIFF file into notation. It skipped over grace notes and trills, and did not handle certain cases with two voices on a staff (like beamed notes in both directions), but all it did was replace dropped notes with rests, so the rest of the piece was OK.

The problem comes when you export to MIDI, then import it into Noteworthy. Some errors are clearly due to SharpEye, such as transposing some staves up two octaves. I think other problems are caused by Noteworthy's MIDI import.

My opinion is that this program is only as useful (for us) as Noteworthy's midi import. If importing a good midi works well for you then give this program a try. If midi import is a disaster for you then don't bother. My experience was that most of the piece imported well, but some parts were trash.

If ShartEye could export directly to Noteworthy (or NWC could import NIFF) I think the results would be much better.
I wonder if Noteworthy would release its file format, and if it is reasonably usable by a third party? The ability to scan music reliably would be a huge productivity boost.

Re: New Music OCR Program

Reply #8 –
Steve, thanks for the info. about Sharpeye. I also used Midiscan some time ago and found it totally useless; see message #485 (I think); Archive 400-499 'Importing NIFF files' Reply 8. I tried Sharpeye with the same file I used in the Midiscan trial, and found Sharpeye to be infinitely better and actually useable. My sample was simple, single staff, single note (Trumpet music)and the corrections required were minimal. I imported the MIDI file into NoteWorthy just fine. I plan to do additional evaluations.
Of course, the music can be printed once it is imported into NoteWorthy. I did not imported the unedited music into NoteWorthy, but perhaps the minimal editing required would be easier in NoteWorthy.
The cost of $50.00 US, is not excessive, compared to others.
Thanks for the find
Don Ruckman ruckdr@jps.net

Re: New Music OCR Program

Reply #9 –
I have been using NWC for someime, and SharpEye since the time of the first posting here. It behaves very well with most music fonts and less well with others. After a while you can almost predict before hand how well it's going to perform. (I have used it for simple and choral scores - I don't know about other programs but I have needed to scan dissimilar score types on the same page as separate entities, e.g. SA plus piano and SATB plus piano.

Clearly the fermata etc which are scanned don't make it into the Midi export file, but the scanned lyrics do. This is a great bonus, but I haven't been able to view these in NWC as I have in other software.

I will be looking very keenly for a notation package which can accept NIFF as an import. I hope that NWC is there as well.

Regards, John