Upload errors on pdf sheet music
I have several pieces of sheet music on pdf, that I only need to transpose into a different key. The sheet music was purchased on a professional website, so the pdf has no flaws.
It uploaded great onto MuseScore. But when I open the file on my Mac, the music is full of errors. MuseScore gives me an error message tells me my file is being saved in MuseScore 3.2. How can that be? I'm using MuseScore 4.0. on my computer.
Can someone please tell me how to avoid all the errors on the sheet music I upload. Transposing only takes 3 seconds. But fixing all the errors from the upload is taking me hours. Please help?
Comments
This can happend due to some (bad) caching on musescore.com, it it ever saw that PDF before you get the result of that previous conversion. Tell-tale sign: the conversion is really quick.
Better get and use Audiveris locally...
In reply to This can happend due to some… by Jojo-Schmitz
Thanks for your help. Can you please tell me what is Audiveris?
In reply to Thanks for your help. Can… by tkhaskin
It is the software behind https:://musescore.com/import
See https://github.com/Audiveris/audiveris
In reply to It is the software behind… by Jojo-Schmitz
Thank you. I'm not sure how to use the page you're referring me to. Looks like you have to know coding to use Audiveris. I don't know coding. (sigh) Thanks anyway for your help.
In reply to Thank you. I'm not sure how… by tkhaskin
No, download and install the latest release
In reply to Thank you. I'm not sure how… by tkhaskin
Scroll down on the linked page until you reach the "Stable releases" section. There you will find further links to the installation programs.
You wrote:
The sheet music was purchased on a professional website, so the pdf has no flaws.
Your purchased PDF is a document - basically an image of "blobs of ink" with each blob's position on the page chronicled and logged so that computers can reproduce the image and printers can print it. No additional "understanding" or "meaning" is assigned to such blobs of ink. Those "blobs of ink" are reproduced flawlessly when printing the PDF.
I only need to transpose into a different key.
Now, with regards to music...
As a printable "blob of ink", a musical element like a quarter note (or a key signature, etc.) has no meaning - nor needs to have - to a printer, for example. The printer only needs to know where to place the blobs on paper - regardless of whether the blobs make notes, key signatures, accidentals, staff/bar/ledger lines, lyrics, etc.
In addition to being "blobs of ink", musical elements contain additional meaning to human musicians. It is the job of music notation software to capture and reproduce (almost understand) such additional meaning.
A sheet music PDF document, then, must be interpreted by an OMR (optical music reader) so that the musical information can be recognized by a score-writing software like MuseScore. Only then can human musicians play back and edit their scores within the score-writing app.
OK... so how to "read" a PDF as music?
There exist third party software that specialize in OMR - as when importing PDF into MuseScore.
See:
https://musescore.com/import
which uses the Audiveris converter and does a 'one-pass' attempt which may, or may not, give satisfactory results.
Better results can be obtained by downloading the (also free) Audiveris software and tweaking its recognition parameters to make the final output more accurate.
OMR is a greater challenge than OCR (optical character reader). OCR software can nowadays easily convert scanned text documents into editable files with great accuracy. OMR has still some distance to travel.
More info. about PDF conversion here (from second paragraph onward):
https://musescore.org/en/node/335327#comment-1142556
Also see:
https://audiveris.github.io/audiveris/_pages/handbook /