Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum OMG! It really works!!

A couple of days ago I downloaded the demo of SmartScore X2, Piano Edition (which, while not cheap, at $80 costs significantly less than the $400 full version), and have been playing around with it.

Now I have a few-years-old version of PhotoScore Lite (it came with Sibelius 6), and I've had very mixed results with it. It wants the scores to be just so; many scores it simply doesn't like at all, and the ones that work generally need significant cleanup after the score has been processed.

Well over the last few days I've tested SmartScore on a variety of piano scores, from entire pieces to single-line illustrative examples of from my music theory textbooks, and it's only made one single solitary mistake, adding a staccato mark that shouldn't have been there.

On the down side, the documentation was pretty opaque on how to get rid of that blasted staccato, but using search on the PDF documentation finally yielded what I needed. Plus, as a Mac person, I find the user interface ugly, cluttered, and non-intuitive. But hey, the program is really good at doing what it's advertised to do: reading in piano music sheet music, and turning it into XML, MIDI, or whatever

So if you've ever wanted to OCR your sheet music, give the demo a try. I was so impressed that I wiggled around my finances so I could buy it.

SmartScore X2, Piano Edition

Oh, and in case you're wondering what I'd use it for, I have way too much sight reading fodder that's in easy keys, and I want to suck it into the computer and transpose it into harder keys. Also, I own Home Concert Xtreme, and this will let me transform more of my sheet music into MIDI files formatted the way that HCX likes them.

I had not heard of this program before tangleweeds, sounds like just the sort of thing I just got to have

That looks very interesting. I've not had problems with PhotoScore Lite but a second option would be very welcome. Their web page says two staves only, no text, no tabs. I wonder if that means it ignores extra staves, chord symbols with tabs and lyrics, or if it means it just refuses to process the aforesaid at all.

I'm not sure what it does with the stuff it says it can't handle. But there's also a "Songbook" edition that handles stuff like vocal staves, chord symbols, and guitar tab (and it looks like maybe lyrics too?).

Songbook Edition

I tried the PhotoScore Lite that came with Sibelius before but had to do so much editing I simply gave it up in favor of typing the music from scratch with Sibelius. Can this program generate Sibelius score files? It would be very useful for me if yes.

I had the same reaction to PhotoScore Lite & Sibelius. In the end I found it was easy enough to enter stuff into Sibelius that it was more work to repair a score mangled by PhotoScore Lite. That's why I was so amazed that SmartScore X2 for piano worked so very well.

SmartScore is, however, made to work with Finale, so to get your score into Sibelius you need to export it as Music XML (or MIDI might work if you wanted that). I haven't experimented around with it very much, but what I did export from SmartScore via XML imported into Sibelius without a problem... but it was just some late elementary piano music, not anything fancy.

Thanks, Tangleweeds! In my case, I need to accurately reproduce the FULL score - slurs, ties, dynamics ... everything. MIDI loses a lot of that. I suspect any conversion via another format might lose quite a bit of the details (or introduce editing necessity). But I will check this software out to see what it can do. Thanks again for the info. - Jeff

Music XML is pretty copiously clever! The question is how cleverly does the importing (and exporting) score program deal with it. For example, Music XML supports tied, slur, glissando, slide, scoop, plop, doit, falloff, wedge, bracket, dashes, and octave-shift! I don't know what half of those are. Music XML (like any XML) is a standardized, structured, textual description format. (MIDI of course is digital, performance data.)

Thanks, Jdeacon. I will check Music XML out. I should really take another serious look at scanning music into Sibelius (via one software or another) for my work.

Interesting, I might have to try this out. Thanks for the heads up.

If it can convert most of the notes and rhythms correctly, then that will save a lot of time rather than starting from scratch.

80 dollars just for downloading the demo?! 400 dollars for the full version? My goodness...
Out of curiosity - what do you intend to do with the program?

All the demo versions are free to download. $80 is the full price of the two-stave, no text "piano" version, $200 is the full price of the three-stave version. $400 is the full price of the orchestral score version.

As jdeacon said, the demo is entirely free. And the free demo would come in very handy for anyone who has a bunch of mystery sheet music that they can't find recordings of, so they don't know what it's going to sound like before going through all the work to learn how to play it.

With the (free) demo, you can scan in the sheet music, and hear what it sounds like. You can also silence one hand's part, so that you can practice HS with the computer playing the other hand's part. The only thing the demo doesn't do is save the translated files, so that each time you use it, you need to re-convert the scans (but that doesn't take very long).

As I mentioned above, one of the main reasons I paid for the software (piano version $80) was that (aside from having lots of mystery music ) I have stacks of music for sight reading practice, but it's all in very easy keys that I don't need any more practice in.

With this software, I can scan in the easy sheet music, and have the software transpose it into more difficult keys where i definitely need more practice. Then software can print out the transposed versions, or I can save paper and export the music in a format I can read via Home Concert Xtreme.

Sorry that I took so much time for responding - the vaccation turned out slightly more chaotic and internetfree than planned.

Thanks though for responding to my question.

Actually, I have downloaded MuseScore (which is free) to listen to a new piece before I try it. I don't think you can transpose easily with it (I haven't studied it enough for that yet). Part of me is fascinated by the possibilities this technology offers.

Part of me - and that might be illogical and paranoid - is scared that it would actually hamper the development of my reading ability, which I feel is fairly poor. Do you have similiar fears? Or do you think that the opposite is true - that it would actually help?

I don't think it would hurt your reading certainly, nor will it help particularly. I use it for making my arrangements, and you can definitely transpose easily. I don't know the command sequence off the top of my head... on my phone at the moment. If you search on their website it will be there I'm sure.