How to scan sheet music
Scanning music can turn your paper music library into a portable digital library that’s with you at all times. It can also help you get notes into a notation software program like Sibelius, Finale, Noteflight or MuseScore super-fast. But what exactly is the process? I’ll share the step-by-step process, my tips for success, which apps, software and equipment you need and suggested workflow patterns.
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Resources and links mentioned in this episode
1. Copyright, Creative Commons, Public Domain score
- Creative Commons information
- Related article: 11 Of The Best Free Sheet Music Sites
2. Scanning apps
3. Music reader/annotation apps and pedal
4. Music scanning software
- Photoscore Lite & Ultimate (includes full comparison of the Lite and Ultimate versions)
- Smartscore (demo version available)
- Sheet Music Scanner
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14 Comments
I have had very good experience with SharpEye 2, which is bundled with Dancing Dots (a software bundle specifically designed for producing Braille music). This has very good OCR for music, though the interface is a bit tricky to learn. This allowed me to scan all of the music I used for a blind student in band. It exports to MusicXML. I usually needed to shore up the score a bit, but this usually did a lot more “magic” out of the box than the built-in Smartscore Lite that comes with Finale.
That sounds great Jacob! I haven’t looked at SharpEye 2 but I’ll check it out. I once played in an orchestra that had two blind violinists (one was the orchestra leader). It was fascinating to witness the rehearsal process with them there and I was amazed by their memorisation skills. They were always ready to play the score from a particular place MUCH more quickly than any of the sighted players who had to fumble through pages of music to find the right spot!
There is an approach to scanning all your books and scores you overlooked. That would be to break the bindings and scan them. As a teacher for the last nearly 20 years, I accumulated a ton of books, scores, misc pieces of music papers stuck in binders, and more. It actually made teaching quite hard when I could not find a book, or perhaps if I misremembered what book something was in. The solution, scan and OCR ALL THE Books.
I decided that the only way to do it properly was to actually break the bindings of books, and then run them through a ScanSnap scanner. The scanner was key in the project, as it does both sides, and can detect when it feeds more than one sheet of paper. So, I scanned hundreds of books and untold numbers of papers with the ScanSnap. Afterwards, I ran Adobe Acrobat on the PDFs to straighten them and do OCR, and compress them better (they were scanned at 600dpi I believe).
Anyhow, now I have all my books, searchable, on my Mac and on Google Drive. It is absolutely a piece of cake to search for something and find it, and easily print it out of a student rather than trying to get the book on the copier. PLUS, I gained a ton of space in my studio.
Wow – Eric. That sounds great! I haven’t used a ScanSnap scanner before and didn’t know there was one that scanned both sides at once. Having a searchable collection of books must be a dream come true! Thanks for sharing the info.
Lots of great information on scanning music. Keep up the good wok!
I was wondering about Genius Scan. I have an iPhone, is this app really good? I’m gonna try a few of these together and see if it helps with my music. I’m preparing some new scores for my class.
I like Genius Scan a lot. I haven’t used many other scanning apps (just a couple) so wouldn’t consider myself an expert but it does everything I need it to.
[…] Use any scanner to get the PDF into PhotoScore. There are more products that can do the job. The Midnight Music Podcast episode How to Scan Music by Katie Argyle mentions some of them. […]
Typing in all the notes by hand is really frustrating. Thanks a lot for the list. I agree: SharpEye should be part of this list. Very good results, but quite difficult to use.
I think ScanScore could be added here, too. It is a cheaper alternative to PhotoScore and SmartScore. It is really worth a look: https://scan-score.com/en/
Thanks for the suggestions Sebastian 🙂
Playscore 2 is an amazing app. I use it all the time to create assigments for students and to make backing tracks of accompinaments. I usually snap a picture of the score, then export it into Ableton Live 10. There, I ca assign high quality sounds to the MIDI data, and play with the feel off the track a bit (swing, groove, etc). Check it out: https://www.playscore.co/
Thanks Brian! I’ll take a look. Sounds good.
Take a look at PlayScore 2 on the App Store. Multi page, multi instrument, PDF, and more. Even better accuracy
Rabuse, you might find MusicXML better than MIDI for export from PlayScore 2. That way you get the full notation not just the notes.