Scan sheet music

Dorico
1

Do Steinberg offer a facility to scan sheet music into Dorico?

2

No; but you should try PlayScore ! And then export MusicXml into Dorico

3

In my experience, only Photoscore is usable for more complex scores.

4

I use both for different things. Playscore for simple, quick jobs and Photoscore for complex stuff.

1 Like
5

This is disappointing to me.
I’m a Finale Print Music user who switched to Dorico Pro recently. My need is fairly simple. I’m a member of our choir at church but I can’t read music. The only way that I can practice our songs outside of choir practice is to scan the sheet music into Print Music & play it back from there.
This isn’t intended as a criticism in any way but it never occurred to me that Dorico might not be able to scan sheet music. For now I can still use Print Music to scan the sheet music but I’m skeptical about how long that will last.

Thanks,
GWGuen

6

If you purchased the Dorico crossgrade from Finale, you could ask them for a possible refund. (Someone here might be able to confirm, but Finale themselves would know.)

There are other programs/apps which can scan and play back (and presumably others will emerge in the future) depending on what computer/devices/tablet etc. you have at the time.

Meanwhile use Print Music (many Finale users are intending to continue using it into the future.)

7

To be fair Dorico is a much younger software, by decades… I have not seen such a request mentioned around here a lot, so I’m not sure how in demand it is as a feature. I don’t think many users would want development time be spent on that sort of thing, but you could always put it in as a request.

8

There is a video where Steinberg suggests to use Newzik for this task:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGt1fMSZfQI

1 Like
9

Music scanning and good recognition of the scans for conversion to sheet music for editing or playback is not a simple process. Finale never really offered its own scanning but AFAIK, it incorporated Smartscore Lite which was feeble to say the least but likely OK for simple pieces. Finale abandoned incorporating scanning into the later products likely due to threat of copyright lawsuits.
Many high-powered Finale users have purchased Smartscore 64 but for multiple staves it isn’t cheap but there is a Finale and Dorico user discount of about 50% and there are cheaper versions that handle only a couple of staves.
MakeMusic has said that they will continue supporting their activation servers into the future (whatever that is) but there will be no support if it breaks due to an OS or other change that renders the software inoperable.
If you bought the Dorico cross-grade I think you can download Finale 27 for free (?). Save your PrintMusic file, open it in Finale 27 and save it as XML and then import the XML into Dorico for playback. I don’t really know what this gains you if satisfactory playback is achieved directly in PrintMusic.

In some community bands I’ve played in some members record the rehearsal on small audio tape recorders and use the recordings for home practice. Would this be an alternative method for you?

10

Thank you all for your replies. Even though I can’t use Dorico to scan sheet music, I think that I’ll still keep it. No matter what MakeMusic says now, I’m concerned that as some point I won’t be able to install Print Music & Finale (needed to do the MusicXml conversion to go to Dorico) on a PC, either due to future versions of Windows or due to the activation servers no longer working, so I’m still going to need a supported base program of some kind and Dorico is certainly at least that.

I looked at Newzik & the linked video. It looks interesting but it’s only for Apple and we use Android so that’s out. And if Steinberg is recommending Newzik to work with Dorico then it certainly doesn’t sound like they’re planning to introduce their own music scanning program any time soon.

I’m looking at PlayScore out of curiosity. It sounds easy but has anyone used it much, in particular the phone apps? If I get a good picture on my phone could it really be easy enough to take pictures of the sheet music and the program would handle them from there? Even if it’s not perfect that seems like a dream come true to me. If I use the Windows version then I presume that I’ll have to scan the sheet music to pdf files and then import the pdf files through PlayScore, which is a little better than what I’m doing now with PrintMusic.

It would not break my heart to find another program to scan sheet music. I’ve been using Print Music since 2007 and I upgraded it in 2010 & 2014, but the last version of it was in 2014, over 10 years ago. It’s a Windows 7 program that works in Windows 10 but has some quirks to it. I have to scan all sheet music in black & white at 360dpi and save each file as an uncompressed TIFF and even when I do everything right there are times when Print Music/Smartscore Lite hangs up because it can’t figure something out. Our church has some really old sheet music for the choir and I’ve had problems at times when the printing has faded or the paper has yellowed reducing the contrast. I’d be thrilled to find a scanning program that isn’t quite as picky as Print Music/Smartscore Lite.

And thanks for the suggestion about using tape recorders but, for whatever reason, I have a hard time picking my part out of a song unless I record where our director only plays my part. Many of the newer songs include mp3 versions of the songs on their websites these days but I can’t pick my Tenor part out of the middle with the Sopranos & Altos above me and the Basses below me.

Thanks,
GWGuen

11

The absolute key to a good scan which means minimum errors on turning into editable sheet music is a good original and by good, I mean almost as good as newly printed page from the score. Even a few copies of copies can degrade it enough to make a difference and old yellow, fuzzy originals aren’t in the good category.
I’m sure the current Smartscore 64 would be a huge improvement from the old Smartscore Lite and it has it’s own set of editing commands that are designed for correcting scans. Music programs like Finale and others, assume what they have makes sense because it is usually entered using the programs user-interface, whereas an unedited scan with atypical errors read into these programs can make correcting difficult. Unfortunately, this also means another learning curve but one worth doing if you are going to use the program. However, it relies on a scanner and good original for best results.
Personally, I don’t think you will be real happy with what you find with phone apps but, surprisingly, I have not always been right :).
Maybe the hard way is the easy way? I’m out of my depth with choral music so this may be incorrect but I looked at some samples and the individual parts don’t look complex; the piano part can be fairly complex, though. Do you need the piano or just your own part played back?
Since you could well just be copying the notes into Dorico (or any other music program) for your part, you might find it not too difficult (there will be irritation at first!) to learn how to enter the notes into the program. You only need to enter what you see as necessary to get the playback and don’t have to fool with coming up with a professional looking score.

12

First off, I’ll say that I’m feeling fairly dumb right now. For too much of this I’ve made decisions without really investigating everything. Well, actually, I’ve gone ahead and done that again now but I’m thinking/hoping/praying that things will work out better this time!

In ALL of this I didn’t hardly think about SmartScore. I did a quick Internet check on it after I realized that Dorico Pro doesn’t scan music but I saw a $400 price for SmartScore 64 Pro and decided that that wasn’t worth it.

Well, when you mentioned it again above I decided to go ahead and check SmartScore 64 again, just in case. I then saw SmartScore 64 Songbook for $200, SmartScore 64 Piano for $80, & SmartScore 64 Midi for $50. All 3 of those might work but the “lyrics” part for Songbook convinced me that that would be worth the price for me (I’ve been manually adding all of the lyrics for all of these songs for years).

I was curious about what version of SmartScore Lite I had in Print Music so I got into it and then I noticed the “Why Upgrade?” button in the window so I clicked on it. That took me to a half-off page on the Musitek website. So, I could get the whole SmartScore 64 Pro for $200, the same price that I was ready to pay for SmartScore 64 Songbook. I went ahead and bought it.

I could have gotten PlayScore for less but I’ve worked with SmartScore already for years so I’m hoping the transition will be easier. If the lyrics part works then that by itself will be worth it to me.

In regards to entering the music manually myself, I started doing just my part in Finale’s old Notepad 2007 but then I realized that I need the piano part of songs, too. And then my wife asked me to do this for her Alto part, too, in a couple of songs. That’s when I decided to go ahead and buy Print Music. And, since it scanned all staffs for each song, I went ahead and created all Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Baritone, & Bass parts of the songs. And, hey, some of these songs have staves for the trumpet or the violin or whatever so I might as well do those staves, too. “Retentive”??? Me?!? What gives you that idea? And then someone from church said that she would like to get MP3 files of just the piano music for each song so that she could sing along to them while driving. So, now I’m creating from 6 to 12 versions of each song that I add to my PC (details available about them if anyone wants to know). To be fair, though, the scanning the pages on the scanner, then the scanning TIFF files in the program, then the editing of the songs, and adding 1 set of lyrics for myself will take me from 4 to 8 hours per song. Breaking it out into the individual parts takes less than 10 minutes so it’s no big deal at that point.

So, maybe I’ve got all of the parts now to speed up and improve adding songs to my PC. That’s good because I just got 4 new songs last night that we’ll be singing over the next few months.

Thanks,
GWGuen

1 Like
13

I wouldn’t completely rule it out; after all, Steinberg launched a survey on this topic exactly one year ago:

https://forums.steinberg.net/t/optical-music-recognition-software-a-short-survey/876174?u=bobmusic

14

Good luck with your scanning and be prepared for some learning and like all scanning it isn’t going to be perfect so some fixup is to be expected. There is a fairly extensive user manual for Smartscore and it contains a wealth of information and is well worth looking at even if you aren’t looking for a particular topic. Clicking on the page number in the index at the end will take you to the topic. There is also a user forum where you might get some help but it isn’t overly busy but there are a couple of users who may be able to help. SmartScore User Forum | Runboard
Of course, there is always Musitek support.

15

Strictly a SmartScore user here. Over the past decade or so, I have run well over a thousand scores through it. Forget lyrics and such; text recognition is pretty poor. The biggest advantage over the “scan and play” programs is that SmartScore has an intermediate stage, where you can quickly find and correct errors before you generate your XML.

There’s a learning curve, but it’s not too steep.

2 Likes
16

Thanks for the comments & suggestions! Sorry that it took so long to reply. It’s been a busy week but the delay was NOT caused by SmartScore. I installed it right after my previous post. I was able to get a 7-page song scanned and created through SS in a couple hours, which was significantly faster than most songs were previously. I noticed a few things:

  1. Lyrics & Text were a mixed bag. SS DID get most of the lyrics right (this was a clean, new copy of the music) but it also brought in ALL of the other text that it found including the guitar chords. I think I’m going to have to scan the sheet music on my scanner & then edit it to remove all other text, including the guitar chords (which aren’t really a problem but aren’t what I’m wanting here). Maybe once I get better at it then I can select the text & delete it after the scan into SS.

  2. The lyrics went fairly well for this song but when the singers on the Treble line and on the Bass line both are singing the same words in a song then the lyrics are usually only printed under the Treble line, which is NOT where I’d want them for the Tenor part. Oh well, typing in the lyrics on the Bass line went fairly quickly. So, overall, scanning lyrics worked fairly well this time. We’ll see how it does later.

  3. Scanning the music itself went fairly well but it’s definitely different to change notes or anything in SS as opposed to Finale. With practice I’ll get used to doing it in SS but I’ve been editing this music in Finale (Print Music) for 17 years. There’s a saying about old dogs and new tricks which comes to mind about now.

  4. One thing seems for sure at this point, there’s no going backwards, only forwards for me. And in this case I’m talking about MusicXML. I transferred the song to Dorico Pro with no problems at all but the same wasn’t true for Finale. Since editing the music in SS was taking so long I tried to transfer the music to Finale using MusicXML but I got multiple error messages and had odd things like the time signature being much bigger than the staffs that they were on. So much for going home again.

  5. There was 1 really weird thing that I encountered when I scanned the music into SS. Every time that the first note on a Treble line was the G above middle C, then the program made it G Sharp. That happened at least 7 times in the song I scanned. The copy looked clean (all 7 places) and I didn’t see anything that the program might mistake as a Sharp so I have no idea what caused this. I was, of course, able to correct those places but I’d prefer not to have to do so.

  6. I was hoping to be able to try importing pdf files instead of having to do the page scanning with my scanner but that doesn’t seem likely in most cases. Our choir director didn’t get any pdf files with the music she ordered & I would apparently have to order a minimum of 10 copies before I could get the pdfs. Oh well…

Overall, this is a definite improvement over how things worked before. One of the other songs that I’ll be scanning soon is one of the older ones from our church which doesn’t have high contrast between the paper and the ink any more. I’ll see how that goes.

Thanks,
GWGuen

17

I’ll be happy to help you get started with SSP, by mail or Zoom.

1 Like