[lorenzini]

Hello everybody!

I'm brand new to this forum, but it's really something to behold. I never knew I would find an Arranger's forum that is this active. Great!

So my question is: Are any of you familiar with Music notation OCR programs?

I am currently scoring in Logic and actually doing fine with it, but receive lots of sheet music from outside that has been printed from Finale, Sibelius or some other notation program.

I also receive Finale and Sibelius files which I need to be able to edit. I know that Sibelius does pretty well with PhotoScore, but I don't know how well.

So what I need to find out is, what is the best Music Notation OCR program you guys can think of?

Thanks!

[JrvUnleashed]

Most people here use some version of Finale. Being the lower-middle class American teenager that I am, I'm stuck with Finale Notepad for now, but I hope to upgrade to Finale in about 2 years when I'm legible for the college student discount. I'd recommend Finale, but if you're looking for good-quality playback, I'd recommend something else, as all the Finales minus the full version have pretty subpar keyboard-sounding midi's for the instruments.

[The-Real-Link]

I hope I understand you question. Are you asking for a way to convert MUS or SIB files into editable files for the Logic program? I'm not familiar with Logic, as I use Finale 2010, but I do know that most Finale programs can export the MUS into an XML or MID file. I don't know about SIB, but I would guess that it can do the same.

[lorenzini]

Hi guys,

Thanks for the responses! I'm talking about OCR - Optical Character Recognition for music notation, whereby you scan in a piece of sheet music and it converts what it sees into a digital format where you can edit it in Sibelius, Finale, etc.

I receive a lot of handwritten charts that need correcting, and, rather than adding to the mess by writing on it more, or recreating the score from scratch, I'd like to be able to use a music OCR program and save a lot of time.

I know Photoscore is considered one of the better choices, and is directly compatible with Sibelius. Any opinions out there? I'd love to know!

[The-Real-Link]

OH! Let me see what my plug-in for Finale is.....my Finale 2010 uses SmartScore 5 by Musitek. I've only used it a couple of times, so I don't really know how well it works. Hope that helps.

[Nicol Armarfi]

If you're going to try using the OCR to make readable scores, it might actually create more work. I've used SmartScore a few times, and it has a lot of trouble distinguishing between different beams and rests, and sometimes the different staves, even if the music was not written by hand.