A Method For Copying Printed Music

Being a new Musescore user I'm a little reluctant to post this method because I may be re-hashing a "we already knew that" topic.

When I'm making a previously created score more legible because I've been given the 300th copy of a copy or it was handwritten to start with and not that easy to read I find that a problem is keeping track of where I am in the original score and given how some bars are repeated or similar it is very easy to get in the wrong place. Also, I seem to suffer from a lot of head movement going from the page to the screen and back.

I am a SmartScore user as well and it brings the scanned image up in a split window above the score that has been created by the music recognition phase. This makes it very easy to check bar against bar particularly since the bars per line are the same. Why not try a similar method with Musescore?

1.Make a .tif or .jpg or other suitable graphic file of the original. It is a big help to put in bar numbers
before making the image since these reduce ambiguity in repeated bars.
2. Open the image in an image editor - free Irfanview works fine.
3. Open Musescore and setup the new file
4. Adjust your windows so the image is on top and Musescore is on the bottom (or vice-versa if you wish). In Windows 7 and perhaps other versions with the image editor and Musescore open you can just right click on the bottom task bar and select "Show Windows Stacked".

You can now see both the original and Musescore version easily in the same plane.

I haven't done a whole lot of work with this method and Musescore yet so there may be some wrinkles for perhaps large scores with many parts.
HTH