import pdf

• Nov 20, 2017 - 12:00

The suggested method of importing pdf files doesn't work for me. The method I saw is old! Is there a more recent method that usually works?


Comments

In reply to by Thomas

Thanks for the response. I believe you understood my Q well enough to give what may be the best answer..

Put simply, I need a way that I can import my music score over to Musescore. I have to believe a lot of people would like to have a method of importing that is pretty much fail safe. I tried your 'I feel lucky' service at https://musescore.com/import which is the suggested method I refer to in my question. But I believe that has been around for at least 5 years. And since Musescore or their fans know it often doesn't work I can't help but wonder why a better solution hasn't been developed. I suppose I'm asking too much from a free service but I see the same issues in Sibelius or Finale. It can't be that hard I wouldn't think! Then too, It would be nice if there was a way I could determine if there is anything I can do to modify my pdf to make it importable. The score in my case, may be too complicated, and there are sentences at the top of the first page. These may be preventing it from working.

In reply to by attaboy

You wrote:
It would be nice if there was a way I could determine if there is anything I can do to modify my pdf to make it importable. The score in my case, may be too complicated, and there are sentences at the top of the first page. These may be preventing it from working.

If you have some pdf editor software and/or even a scanner, you can try things such as removing pictures, text, fingerings, and other non-musical glyphs to make it easier for the OMR software. Of course, if the pdf was created from a scanned image (i.e.picture) rather than exported from a scorewriter, a pdf editor won't work, but re-scanning at a different resolution may.
Also, you can download Audiveris (free) for yourself and try your hand at using it directly.

More info:
https://musescore.org/en/node/265326
especially:
https://musescore.org/en/node/265326#comment-809174

Regards.

In reply to by attaboy

As for why a better solution hasn't been developed, it's because it is in fact an extremely hard problem to solve, and there are far fewer people interested in working on that than, say, speech recognition, which is also pretty experimental technology that doesn't work all that well but at least does improve more noticeable year by year.

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