Scanning Software

[gelliot2]

Can anybody tell me if there any good programs these days that will accurately scan sheet music into a P.C for downloading to a MIDI device?

In the past I've used a demo version of SmartScore (version2 or thereabouts) and a version of SmartScore Light that came with Finale but they were so dreadful I always ended up entering the notation manually.

[baz]

Sharpeye seems to work the best out of all of them for me, but you still have to do alot of editing, I find it faster in the end to input manually using Sibelius.

[gary]

Dreadful? Are you scanning clean, printed music or scanning manuscript?

I have had Smart Score in the past and use Photo Score now and have found that the accuracy, just like with text OCR-ing, is directly related to the quality of the source document which, unfortunately, must be pretty good. But I started out with Smart Score's predecessor on floppy disc and can definitely say these programs are getting better al the time.

I have tried Sharp Eye also and thought it was almost as good as the other two but at a lesser cost, which would be an advantage. My main reason for using Photo Score is that it is integrated into Sibelius, which is the notatino program I use.

[baz]

I have all the real books in PDF format, I then convert to Tiff using Adobe Pro 6, then Sharp Eye reads and converts either to Xml for Finale or Niff for Sibelius to read, if the image is fairly complex the result is messy but for a straighforward lead sheet I mostly get a good result with little editing.

[gary]

baz - would'nt it be more accurate or convenient for you to print out the tune and then scan it directly into Sibelius?

[baz]

Yes, but Photo score just did not give me a good result, maybe I need to spend more time with it, Sharp Eye was easier to use, plus I like the XML format as I use Finale as well as Sibelius depending on what I need to do.The reason I go the long way around is to keep printing to a minimum.

[Paul Coats]

I have had nothing but problems from the several scanning programs that I have tried, including the one that comes with Finale now. Another, I exchanged many emails with the tech support, never got good scans. There would be so many problems to correct, that it was easier to just enter all of the notes manually from a blank score.