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Scanned music

I volunteered to take over the music at church. I'm a 1 woman choir! My problem is, vocally I'm an alto and many of our songs are written too high for me and most people at church. Any way to scan a piece into noteworthy and tweak it to go lower without typing it in one note at a time? For some songs, it's ok to put in a note at a time, but then I have trouble getting the lyrics to match up.

Re: Scanned music

Reply #1 –
There's really no way that I know of to import scanned images into NWC. Scanned sheet music will come out in .jpg or .bmp, and NWC isn't equipped to read these file types. Looks like you'll be doing it by hand, unless, of course, you import a midi file of the song into NWC. BTW, good luck with your new position. Music Ministry can get rough. :)
-DAVID COOPER

Re: Scanned music

Reply #2 –
G'day Becky,
actually, there is a pretty good tool called "SharpEye" which is an OCR for music.

Scan, edit in SharpEye, export to MIDI or MusicXML and then import to NWC1 from the MIDI or from MusicXML into NWC2 using Nicolas Hatier's MXML2NWCC converter.  It works quite well.

However, a few caveats:
a) Your source music needs to be pretty good, or you end up with a lot of corrections to do in SharpEye.
b) I find it is best to do as many corrections as possible in SharpEye prior to export to minimise the work in NWC
c) MIDI import is nowhere near as good as MXML import, so it's good if you qualify for the NWC2 beta
d) Some shorter works are easier to simply rekey - especially if you've gained some facility at the task.

I plays 'Bones, crumpets, coronets, floosgals, youfonymums 'n tubies.
 

Re: Scanned music

Reply #3 –
Quote
actually, there is a pretty good tool called "SharpEye" which is an OCR for music.
Well, now you've gotten me interested. Where do you get this tool? Sounds useful.
-DAVID COOPER

Re: Scanned music

Reply #4 –
G'day Dave,
Sharpeye is available from;
http://www.visiv.co.uk/

mxml2nwcc is from Niversoft:
http://www.niversoft.com/downloads/mxml2nwcc.zip

You may or may not already have this bit but it is required for mxml2nwcc:
Requirements: Microsoft .Net Framework v2.0 (You can get it through Windows
Updates, http://update.microsoft.com/)
I plays 'Bones, crumpets, coronets, floosgals, youfonymums 'n tubies.

Re: Scanned music

Reply #5 –
Sharpeye comes with a trial period. It's pretty good, but yes - you do need a good original of the sheet music.
If you want to buy it, it does not come cheap. It's not exactly a Noteworthy price.
Somebody gave me an illegal copy of another program (that does not have a tryout period) but I hardly ever use it - hence, I would never buy it.
Then again, maybe I would, but I would buy a better scanner first! The scanner quality is of some influence, I gather.

If you have a lot of work to do, it's worth figuring out all this - and coming back to this forum for more help and instructions. Just a few pages aren't worth the hassle, but it seems that you have enough to do to make it worth your while.

Re: Scanned music

Reply #6 –
Hi There!  I run a community choir here in England and I have been using Noteworthy (then NWC2) for about 5 years, and SharpEye for about a year now - I use both extensively and I find that if I scan Sheet Music using around 300dpi, black and white, and save it as TIF then for a piece of music around 300 bars, I get about 20 or so rythm errors mostly.  just this past weekend I scanned a medley of 14 of the hits of the Beatles and it took me around 1 hour to scan it, read it into Sharpeye, fix errors, and then export a MIDI file for import into NoteWorthy2 and then creating individual SATB staffs for rehearsal purposes.

Biggest problem I find after all this time, is that when I import the MIDI into NoteWorthy2, NWC2 consistently creates two eighth notes, beamed in the place of quarter notes (and btw quarter rests followed by an eighth rest it changes to a dotted quarter rest) - that's a HUGE pain - that is what takes most of my time to fix in NWC.  Has anyone have a solution for this?  I tried using Global Modification, but gave up after an hour of trying....  I'm interested in what you had to say about MXML -= SharpEye supports this export but I cannot see that NWC2 supports that import?
Thanks and kind regards
Cliff

Re: Scanned music

Reply #7 –
G'day Cliff,
I was interested to read what you had to say about MIDI import from Sharpeye...

The mxml2nwcc import does note have these problems.  If you check the links in my post above, you can download MXML2NWCC as a zip with instructions etc. and it will definitely save you a lot of hassles compared to the MIDI import.

While I only ever used the trial version of Sharpeye (I never had enough use for it to worry about actually purchasing it) it performed very well under test.  I had previously tried the v1. release and found it to be lacking, the v2. release is far superior.

As for MXML2NWCC - it is static - Nicolas is a professional software developer and I think he built this "on spec".  If any further development is required it's my bet that we'll have to get in touch with him and arrange to pay for development.  As it stands however, it does everything necessary and I thank Nicolas for releasing it the way he has.  He has certainly benefitted the NWC community.
I plays 'Bones, crumpets, coronets, floosgals, youfonymums 'n tubies.

Re: Scanned music

Reply #8 –
Hey Lawrie

Thank you so much for your constructive answer - GREAT to hear there is a MXML import facility - wow!  Great news.  This probably negates my next post then as well... :)

Cheers and have a great day

Cliff

Re: Scanned music

Reply #9 –
Lawrie

I cannot believe this - it's amazing!!  Used the MXML2NWCC utility and it converted the file PERFECTLY first time - wow - well done to Nicolas - this will save me many many hours of correcting!!

Thanks once again!

Cheers

Cliff

Re: Scanned music

Reply #10 –
'tis a pleasure Cliff,
glad it's helped.
I plays 'Bones, crumpets, coronets, floosgals, youfonymums 'n tubies.

XML 2 NWC

Reply #11 –
[Deleted]

Re: Scanned music

Reply #12 –
For extracting parts from big band scores, my time is cut by 1/2 to 2/3 with Sharpeye then importing the result to NWC2.  I prefer to make the corrections in NWC because Sharpeye requires too much mousing for me.

You can reduce scanning errors if you increase the dots per inch to more than 300 - I like 600 - or increase the size of the scan through the settings on your scanner program, perhaps set it to 110% or 120%. 

Doing a score is sometimes a pain, though, because the program sometimes mixes up lines.



Re: Scanned music

Reply #13 –
Just in the MXML2NWC utility,

anyone finding anything lacking in it?

It does not import non-standard (i.e., non-Western) tuning very well.  I work a lot with Byzantine music and am planning on writing my own utility to cover this gap.

If anyone has found anything else lacking, let me know, and I'll see how easy it is to add it to the script/program. (The new NWC2 text format is great for allowing this bi-directional access to formats such as MXML.)

Re: Scanned music

Reply #14 –
G'day Matta,
I'd be interested in anything you come up with in this regard.

Don't forget we don't actually have an mxml export for NWC2, only Nicolas' import tool.  The available export is for NWC1.
I plays 'Bones, crumpets, coronets, floosgals, youfonymums 'n tubies.

Re: Scanned music

Reply #15 –
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Since 1998

Re: Scanned music

Reply #16 –
Lawrie, you said:

[Don't forget we don't actually have an mxml export for NWC2, only Nicolas' import tool.  The available export is for NWC1.]

Have I missed something?  The last time I tried to use James Lee's nwc2xml to export XML from NWC1, it produced an outdated version of XML that would not import into Sibelius.  Is there now an updated version?

Bill.

Re: Scanned music

Reply #17 –
G'day Bill,
that's the only one I'm aware of - I didn't know its output was outdated... 

Perhaps Matta can solve this for us.
I plays 'Bones, crumpets, coronets, floosgals, youfonymums 'n tubies.

Re: Scanned music

Reply #18 –

Quote
it produced an outdated version of XML that would not import into Sibelius

I'm not surprised the output can't be imported to Sibelius. 

The window says "The MusicXML data is converted and sent directly to the Noteworthy Composer Application."  The program itself is named "mxml2nwcc"

I can confirm that it works fine for NWC2. 

Re: Scanned music

Reply #19 –
G'day David,
mate, ya got the horse by its tail... ;)

We were talking about the mxml export program that works on v1 files, not Nicolas' import tool for NWC2.

Actually, I'm a little surprised that Sibelius couldn't import the mxml file, even if it was an older version of the mxml specification I would expect that programs like Sibelius would have the ability to read it.  Surely the current spec. is simply a superset of the old...  Nah, that would be sensible...
I plays 'Bones, crumpets, coronets, floosgals, youfonymums 'n tubies.

Re: Scanned music

Reply #20 –
I probably have the wrong horse altogether.