How to scan the notes?

January 16, 2011 3:48 PM

Can anyone give feedback on their experience with OCR music notation software for Mac?

I am considering buying Smartscore or Photoscore to scan in existing sheet music (grand staff for piano, with a single staff vocal line) and convert it to either Sibelius 6 or Finale 2011. Has anyone had experiences with either of these pieces of software? Is it really worth coughing up $200, or by the time I deal with scanning and correcting the inevitable errors, should I have just entered the music via the notation software of my choice?

posted by pianoboy to Media & Arts (3 answers total)

Best answer: I've used SmartScore Lite (which came with Finale 2009) with mixed results. If the original is clean and the scan is good and not tilted/rotated AT ALL, the import works fairly well. With messy originals or those with odd notations, I'm much better off entering the music from scratch. I can't say if SmartScore is any better than the Lite version because I haven't used that.

I would not pay the extra money for the full version because enough of my music has odd notation and markup (handbell music) that makes it very hard to get a good import. If you're working with fairly traditional notation and clean originals, it might well be worth your money and time to go with the scanning software.
posted by Clinging to the Wreckage at 5:11 PM on January 16, 2011

My son uses Smartscore Lite/Finale for this, and he says that even with rough originals it still beats entering notation by hand, even with the inevitable cleanup time and effort. He's sometimes surprised at how well it actually does work considering the handwritten notation he often needs to convert. With clean originals he says it rarely misses.

He does this on a MacBook, and makes his living doing it while in grad school. When I suggested he upgrade to the full (not Lite) version of Smartscore he said he just didn't think it was worth it for him at the moment.
posted by imjustsaying at 3:39 AM on January 17, 2011

There's little question that you'd spend less time scanning-then-correcting modern, straightforward sheet music than you would entering them by hand. Go ahead and check out the trial version of Photoscore...
posted by kalapierson at 1:06 AM on August 4, 2011