Something better than photoscore?

[harrisonreed]

Photoscore can't read time signatures, distinguish triplets, identify basic words written in the latin alphabet, identify basic dynamics written in italics, and basically only does a good job of identifying every note head and staff line, while messing up literally everything else on the page. So you get a scan that gives you a massive mess to sort out and it doesn't really save any time.

Anyone have a different program they use to get sheet music scanned in and ready to work with in Sibelius or Finale? I would love one that gets the note values correct but also doesn't turn accents into 7's or write jibberish words instead of note beams.

[Doug Elliott]

All of that is true of the free version, but I understand the paid one is much better - but I've never bought it. Which one have you used?

[robcat2075]

The MuseScore (experimental) conversion service has improved since I tried it several years ago but it's not 100% of your wants.

Scan on the left... MuseScore result on the right.

musicConversion.jpg

[muschem]

The MuseScore (experimental) conversion service has improved since I tried it several years ago but it's not 100% of your wants.

Just to add a bit to that...
MuseScore uses Audiveris to handle conversion, which is also available to install locally, if you don't want to wait for MuseScore to proxy the file processing for you. While it is free, I've had mixed results with using Audiveris for conversion. A lot depends on the quality of the input, but you can run into some pretty weird output when Audiveris guesses at what you want. Clean-up in the Audiveris software is possible to an extent if you install the engine locally (tuning the output isn't an option as far as I know in using the service through MuseScore), but clean-up is pretty painful and the available options for correcting bad conversion guesses are limited. For me, for simple inputs, it is often just as quick to manually enter things in MuseScore as it is to do a lot of clean up on a bad Audiveris conversion. But, when it gets things right, it can save a lot of time.

I've been meaning to try some other OMR options to see if I like something better than Audiveris. If I ever get around to that, I'll chime in with more feedback.

[harrisonreed]

All of that is true of the free version, but I understand the paid one is much better - but I've never bought it. Which one have you used?

Pro version. It's not what I need, unfortunately.

[harrisonreed]

Is musescore able to send a file to Sibelius?

[muschem]

Is musescore able to send a file to Sibelius?

Seems so, but I haven't tried it: https://musescore.org/en/node/272634

[JohnL]

The MuseScore (experimental) conversion service has improved since I tried it several years ago but it's not 100% of your wants.

Scan on the left... MuseScore result on the right.

musicConversion.jpg

I'm pretty that's had some post-conversion cleanup. Someone added that q=120 tempo and the piano dynamic marking. No telling how much more they did.

[robcat2075]

The MuseScore (experimental) conversion service has improved since I tried it several years ago but it's not 100% of your wants.

Scan on the left... MuseScore result on the right.

musicConversion.jpg

I'm pretty that's had some post-conversion cleanup. Someone added that q=120 tempo and the piano dynamic marking. No telling how much more they did.

No, I have not done anything to it other than screen grab it off the page.

The 120 seems to be a Musecore default
and the two "p" appear to be misreadings of words that have "p" in them

[robcat2075]

Here is the PDF I used to test, so you may try it yourself.

Music-converted.pdf

[MrHCinDE]

A trumpet-player I know uses Capella to scan. He can export to MusicXML which can be opened in pretty much anything.

He recently scanned in a quintet for us to work on a multi-track project and what he sent me was quite usable. He didn’t grumble about doing a lot of manual corrections so I assume the scan worked quite well. I think Capella has a free trial period so just try it out if you’re interested.

[robcat2075]

The problem with these conversion things is that even if it does a 100% accurate job... you don't know that until you have 100% A/B compared every note between the input and output.

It's like Tesla's Full Self Driving. It will drive the car for you but you still have to be as attentive as if you were driving the car in case it fails.