Best way to preserve old scores?

Dorico
1

Happy new year all users here!

I have a bunch of music written with the old Score program by San Andreas Press and I want to bring it into the newer world. My current way is to import it into Sibelius 3 and export it with Sibelius 8.3 as xml and then import this into Dorico. This worked fine with smaller scores. But the latest Dorico crashes with a bigger score. @Daniel, I sent you a crash report in parallel.

Are there better ways to perform this process?

Many thanks in advance and regards,
Felix

2

Hi Felixp.
Have you tried exporting as XML with the (free) Dolet plug-in? I find I have nice results, with scores that come from Photoscore… Maybe that could help?

3

Hi Marc,

yes, I did. The XML file is much bigger, but now Dorico crashes. Sorry, I forgot to mention.
In the meantime, I tried the tools from scorelib (https://scorelib.sapp.org/). After fixing some bugs in it, I came here to the point that they do not seem to be mature enough to handle orchestra scores. And extending it seems to be a major task, because of the fact that it requires that each page consists of all instruments.

Today I will try to check if the Dolet output contains some violations of the musicxml schema.

I will check Photoscore, thanks for the hint.

Many thanks and best regards,
Felix

4

You could try a general technique for isolating problems like this: split the Sibelius score into two roughly equal sections and try to import them separately. Split the section that fails again, and repeat until either it is “obvious” what the problem is, or the section that fails is small enough so you don’t mind entering the music again in Dorico.

There have been some reports of people getting round this sort of problem by importing the MusicXML into MuseScore and re-exporting it. MuseScore is free, so it might be worth trying.

5

If you can export your old files to PDF, you might want to try PDFtoMusic from Myriad. It works very well on PDF’s exported directly from any music notation software. It doesn’t work on scanned PDF’s, though.
I’m not associated with the company in any way - I just have good experiences with it.

6

Rob,

many thanks for the advice. Indeed MuseScore is the first program that I found, that gives detailed information about possible problems like incomplete or overfull bars.

Best regards, Felix