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Topic: Music scanning software? (Read 3134 times) previous topic - next topic

Music scanning software?

Hi all,
What music scanning software do people on this forum like best?  Score to be scanned is a choral piece--4 parts plus reduction.  This is for my own personal use--not to be shared with others!

If there is a recent post with recommendations for music scanning software, please direct me to it.  All the posts I can find are very old.

Many thanks in advance, Peg M

Re: Music scanning software?

Reply #1 –
Visiv's SharpEye works well.  Best results seem to be with black and white bitmap files and accuracy is improved if you have fairly high resolution images.  I suggest scanning at 400 dpi or more.
http://www.visiv.co.uk/index.htm

If I recall correctly, you can scan within SharpEye, but I usually just scan externally and save the result as a bmp file, which I then open in SharpEye.

You can do lots of basic editing in the program, and then export the results in musicxml file format, which you then import to Noteworthy via  Niversoft's xml2nwc program at https://www.niversoft.com/products/xml2nwc/#conversion

 

Re: Music scanning software?

Reply #3 –
Hi David,
I successfully scanned and read a page of music (1 line of vocal and piano accompaniment) with Sharpeye 2.68.  But Sharpeye marked every tremolo as a rhythm error.  I "fixed" the rhythm error by changing the tremolo to 2 notes of correct duration using Sharpeye editor.  But this is tedious. 

In terms of efficiency, is it better just to delete the tremolos in Sharpeye and put them back in in NWC--or can you suggest a better method using Sharpeye editor? 

Many thanks, Peg M

Re: Music scanning software?

Reply #4 –
Rhythm errors within SE often indicate bars where you need to add a missing note, change a note value or change a regular note to a grace note.  Yes, it's a pain, but if you've got a bunch of notes that need the same change, you can highlight them (control-click) then change them all at once.

I edit the easy things within SharpEye, then export the result, and do the rest of the editing in NWC, where it's usually fast and easy to do.  If there are rhythm errors, they'll sometimes show up in NWC as very tiny, hard to see, red dots where the missing notes were.  You have to delete those and replace them with the right note, so you might as well fix as many as possible within SharpEye.

You ask
Quote
is it better just to delete the tremolos in Sharpeye and put them back in in NWC--or can you suggest a better method using Sharpeye editor
.  NWC doesn't have staff notation for tremolo (by which I mean slanted lines that cross note stems), so you'll have to input them as text.  Why not edit the tremolos out of the image file before you have SharpEye open it, then you'll not get those particular rhythm errors.  The image is just a bit map and you can edit it with Paint to replace the notes stems with tremolo marks to ordinary vertical lines representing a regular note stem.  Save the result and import that to SharpEye. 

Sometimes I add a staff of whole rests and bar lines to NWC, with bar lines extending to the next staff, to use as a visual check.  That way if some rhythm errors get past you, the bar lines that don't line up will point you to the right bars.

Re: Music scanning software?

Reply #5 –
Quote from: David Palmquist –
NWC doesn't have staff notation for tremolo (by which I mean slanted lines that cross note stems), so you'll have to input them as text.
Well, it doesn't have them natively, although there is now a user object that can draw (and play) tremolos. However, I am betting that if SharpEye is saving tremolos in its MusicXML file, the program that converts MusicXML to NWC doesn't know about the custom objects.