Scanning handwritten music
The choir I am singing in has 300+ pieces of old, handwritten music in the library. They are copied over and over again without maintaining the original (so some of the music is rather bad).
I want to 'revise' the music and bring it to MuseScore.
For that reason I am looking for software that maps scanned music to something MuseScore understands (e.g. MusicXML).
They only software I found claiming to be able to do this is "PhotoScore & NotateMe Ultimate 8". This is rather expensive though. So before buying it I would ask the community:
Does someone have any experience with this or other software to do this?
Comments
I use Photoscore often, but I have found even with clean copies of music, I still need to go through it thoroughly checking for errors, and I do find the occasional one or two.
As the quality of the image or pdf diminishes, the more errors I find, and the repair of the xml takes just as long as it would if I just entered the score into Musescore by hand in the first place.
As for handwritten music, the same could be said, although personally, I have never had any success scanning handwritten scores through Photoscore, which is not to say other have.
Your end result of the scan therefore depends of the quality of the handwritten peice and the OCR program being used.
You can also use File / Import PDF from within PDF, which uses an online service powered by the open source program Audiveris. It will require more work to clean up than expensive commercial packages, but is worth a shot. Realistically, scores imported by this process almost always require extensive hand-editing; the state of this technology is still pretty primitive.
In reply to You can also use File / by Marc Sabatella
This is what I tried, but for handwritten scanned to PDF music this was recognised really badly. For me it made reentering faster.
I am specifically looking for conversion of handwritten scrores but processing those proves to be difficult.
In reply to This is what I tried, but for by Rob Jasper
Unfortunately the best software to handle any type of handwritten music is the human eyes and brain. If you have time, do it manually. If you have money, hire someone to do it for you. But I'm afraid there is no shortcut :)
In reply to This is what I tried, but for by Rob Jasper
Better forget about it and enter them manually.
I've been in the same situation some 5 years ago, several hundred scores, some hand written some not, but mostly copies of copies or copies and barely readable. I've entered them into MuseScore manually and currently have some 400 different scores in MuseScore format.
It is a lot of work, but you don't need them all at once I guess.
You can try SmartScore X2 Pro. I find it better at scanning than PhotoScore and it supports the full implementation of MusicXML 3.0.
http://www.musitek.com/
The Professional version is the only one to consider here. There's a demo so you will know if it will work for you or not. You may think it's expensive @ $399.00 but, if it works, what is your time worth?
Finale owners can purchase it for $299 and there are upgrade paths for owners of older or lesser licenses.
>I want to 'revise' the music and bring it to MuseScore.<
Uhh... yea... You are likely to find that this will not work with a scanning tool. As has been pointed out already, the best tool is a person working with notation software. Who knows? You may get lucky.
Since MuseScore does not support real time note entry, you are likely to find this task much easier using a professional notation program. The downside is that those are not free.