What do you scan with?
I'm new to Musescore but at first sight it looks good. What do people use to OCR printed music? I've tried the sharpeyes demo and it works well, but I'd prefer to find something a little cheaper.
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IME Sharpeye is the best there is, so far.
There is an Open Source project called Audiveris trying to achieve this, but it still has a long way to go to beat the speed and accuracy of Sharpeye, providided you use 300dpi scans.
HTH
Michael
I haven't used Sharpeye but it does indeed get good reviews.
Smartscore unfortunately doesn't seem to have a lot of development going on. The current version is a few years old and there have been no changes although a Smartscore free reader program has been introduced.
Got into Smarscore via a circuitous historical path and over the years upgraded to the Pro version which is quite expensive but on the whole not a bad program. I think the scanning engine is the same in the cheaper versions which are limited to the number of staves and missing some of the more exotic score organization features but they still cost money!
IMO, Smartscore has a great UI for correcting scan errors.. I tried correcting a scan in Finale a couple of times and that was a nightmare. but some of that may just be because Smartscore is the devil I know better. I should mention most of my work is done with single instrument parts not full scores.
The secret to success for any good music OCR seems to be the quality of the original being scanned. Even a few generations of a copy of a copy is enough to degrade the accuracy and if it is handwritten then don't even bother scanning.
A problem with music scanning is that there are numerous individual elements to properly recognize so even a high success rate can still leave a number of things to correct. And since there is no redundancy as there is in written words you can't just run it through a "spell-check" type process and correct it further.
I know there are a lot of power-users on the Finale Forum that say they can enter a score faster manually compared to scanning and correcting. The scanning feature that comes with Finale is called Smartscore Lite and it is an old version iwth serious limitations so I would certainly believe that. Having seen a power-user manually enter a score I can also see where that may be quite true in many cases except where the OCR did a very good job.
I find the Musescore UI to be pretty good for entering notes quickly manually even though I haven't done a lot. My biggest problem is finding my place again on the original after looking at the monitor.
In reply to SmartScore by Zoots
You should try the demo. It is a big improvement over their previous release, SmartScore X. It was released earlier this year (2013) and I am very happy with the upgrade.
OMR (optical music recognition) may seems a panacea to digitalize music. However, it has some additional complications with respect to OCR which make it hardly a viable solution.
One is already implied in Zoots' post: correctling an error is usually much more complex with music than with text, so any error requires much more work to correct (in some programs more and in other less, but more than for text anyway).
Another is that finding errors is more difficult and proof-reading less straightforward than with text: catching a missing note is easy (and could be automated, to some extent); catching a wrong note or a missing (or wrong) slur or articulation or fingering or dynamics (assuming the OMR program can cope with them!) is much more difficult and there is no way to automate it, so the probability of leaving behind errors is much higher than with text.
The little experience I had with OMR quickly made me to conclude that the overall time involved in OMR (+ error correction) is comparable with directly entering from scratch and the little time OMR might save does not compensate for the decrease in reliability.
Any update on new technology is welcome, though!
M.
In reply to OMR (optical music by Miwarre
I don't consider manual entering of data to be all that much more reliable than correcting a scan but this depends on how well the scan is recoginized.
From my experience with Smartscore with a reasonable original, it usually has a very high sucess rates in identifying the note pitches but wil sometimes get the duration wrong or will miss a note completely.However, it turns the bars containing incorrect time pink so time problems are easily identified which works as a proofing aid. Of course, there is Playback which also provides a proofing aid for both pitch and some articulations and to a certain extent dynamics.
That being said, proofreading is indeed difficult and I have had to fix up scores, both scanned and manually entered, in several iterations before I considered them correct and even at that an error may come to light later on. I usually have my wife proofread what I think is the final and either because she is just better at it or hasn't been staring at it for some time tends to find errors in what I though was perfect.
After the recognition pass of a new scan, I make the decision whether or not I want pursue correcting or manually entering. Sometimes the scanned version by virtue of the incorrect time pink bars looks bad but this may be caused by missing barlines which are extremely easy to reinsert.. Sometimes a slight readjustment of the scan parameters such as brightness or resolution may greatly improve the accuracy. Interestingly, a higher resolution scan does not necessarily mean a better result in the recognition phase.
I use the new version of SmartScore (X2 Pro). It is a big improvement over their previous release, SmartScore X. In was released earlier this year (2013). I import SmartScore X2 files into both Finale and Sibelius using SmartScore's MusicXML utility and my scores open looking pretty much identical to how they appear in SmartScore. I tested Photoscore and while it is also very accurate, the editing interface seems clumsy except for very basic functions. That's my 2 cents.
In reply to SmartScore X2 works well by Kittifer
Thank you for your contribution. :)