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Topic: Writing up songs (Read 4033 times) previous topic - next topic

Writing up songs

Is there a program that scans printed music and puts it onto
noteworthy?

Re: Writing up songs

Reply #1 –
Not all in one go, but there are music OCRs such as Sharp Eye (from www.visiv.co.uk)which make a fair attempt at creating a midi file from the printed music (how well this works depends on the quality of the original) and then you can import the midi into Noteworthy Composer using File Open. Unless the music is very complex however, I have found that it is generally quicker to enter it into NWC note by note; - using the keyboard shortcuts (eg number pad to set note lengths,sharps, and flats, space bar for rests, '*' for barlines etc) it can be very quick indeed to enter a line of music (for me, this is quicker than I can type text!!)

Re: Writing up songs

Reply #2 –
how would it work.  I mean the printed music's just ink on
a page, right?

Re: Writing up songs

Reply #3 –
So are UPC's, but computers can read them just fine.

The big difference is that UPC's were designed to be read by computers, so they contain enough orientation and error-correction features so that you can be sure the computer gets it right (almost) all the time.

Printed music certainly contains some cues of this nature.  For example, five parallel lines are likely to belong to a staff, and once the OCR software has identified the staff it knows a number of things about the notation in general, such as how thick stems and beams are likely to be and where to look for clefs.  Once it has identified the clef, it knows the pitches of the noteheads that appear on the staff.  And so forth.

I suspect the hardest thing is working out the rhythmic notation, especially when multiple voices share the same staff (or the number of voices on the staff changes from measure to measure or even within a measure).

It's not hard to understand why people who have tried OCR software generally mention how much time it takes to fix up the result once it's been read into the computer.

Re: Writing up songs

Reply #4 –
Did you look at the Sharp Eye website that I quoted above? This will explain better than I can what it can do. As to how it works I guess its a similar (but more complex) process to text OCR (optical character recognition). The scanned image is searched for staves, notes etc, and eventually comes out as a midi file. You can download a free trial version so why not give it a try (assuming you have access to a scanner) and see what you think.

Re: Writing up songs

Reply #5 –
just to clarify that my last post was directed at Simon not at Grant, who had sneaked in another reply to this topic while I was composing mine!!

Re: Writing up songs

Reply #6 –
Yes, I'm sneaky that way.  I have done this (and been done unto) several times in the past.  Sometimes (when I remember) I refresh my view of the thread I'm replying to before pressing "Submit", just to avoid such collisions.

It occurs to me wonder if it would be possible for the "Submit" processing to do this for you, and pop up a continue/cancel dialog if it sees that there's been activity on your target page since you pressed "Add New Reply".  Not that this is a serious problem, but it would be a nice little enhancement.