TromboneChat

I use Finale PrintMusic 2007 for music notation.  It has all the features I need.  PrintMusic 2007 also includes Musitek SmartScore Lite, which I don't find useful at all.  I'd like to get a low cost music scanning program.  There is, of course the free program Audiveris that can create musicxlm files that can be imported into PrintMusic.  MUSITEK SmartScore Version 1.3 (new old stock) is available for a very reasonable price.  I'd like to be able to scan individual parts into PrintMusic to convert a French Horn Part into a Trombone part for a brass quartet.  I'd also like to be able to scan a trombone duet and convert it to a trombone/horn duet.  Are either of these products worth getting, or am I better off just inputting the music myself?

Teach your horn player to read bass clef

I have used Sibelius First for both writing music and also for scanning PDFs. It does not scan perfectly and you need normally to spend some time fixing and adjusting after the scan is done, my experience is that there is always something the scanning program does not understand. This correction takes for me normally 1 - 1,5 hour on average but it is still faster than keying in from scratch.

So the scanning function might not be that good for more complex sheets, but I suggest you try it out.

You can rent Sibelius First on monthly basis for USD 4,99. There is also 30-days trial period.

I write something only a few times a year and it is always very simple stuff, such as riff based arrangements for 2-3 horns.
So the pricing model with monthly rent is perfect for me. That way you also get the most updated software.

I used Finale Printmusic 2007 (and 2011?) earlier but I now prefer Sibelius, I think it is faster and more intuitive for doing simple stuff. The function for printing to paper is also very good.

Well I'm guessing finding software that will match your 2007 product without any compatibility issues might be a problem. Does your program handle Music XML?

Plus if it's just to transpose one part for trombone, that's really not long to input into the program yourself.

My experience with music scanning and OCR programs is with Photoscore, which goes with Sibelius. It works almost perfectly for computer generated PDFs (as in not something printed and then scanned) where the only errors it makes are in the lyrics. But when scanning printed scores, it need quite a lot of corrections. For a score from the days of plate engraving, it gets harder. I used it to scan a 19th century violin concerto that only had parts and no score and it was hours and hours of corrections. Still faster than inputting by hand but not by much. If it had been the other way around (scanning the score to produce parts) it would probably not have been worth it. It really doesn't deal well with busy scores, collisions, and very high passages being visually closer to the previous staff than the one it actually belongs in. Manuscript, no way.

Quote from: Le.Tromboniste on Today at 04:09 AMWell I'm guessing finding software that will match your 2007 product without any compatibility issues might be a problem. Does your program handle Music XML? PrintMusic 2007 can handle MusicXLM

Quote Plus if it's just to transpose one part for trombone, that's really not long to input into the program yourself.
I was just giving examples.  I also want to be able to transpose multiple parts and convert Trombone Quartets to Brass Quartets and vice versa.

Step-entry with a MIDI keyboard is pretty snappy if your software recognizes it. Faster than mouse entry, faster than correcting a scanned score.

Someone really ought to devote some neural network AI to score scanning.

Quote from: robcat2075 on Jan 20, 2018, 10:33PMStep-entry with a MIDI keyboard is pretty snappy if your software recognizes it. Faster than mouse entry, faster than correcting a scanned score.

Someone really ought to devote some neural network AI to score scanning.


Its on my bucket list!  But it's likely someone will beat me to it.  I'm still a few months away from doing a lot of the deep leaning stuff. I can barely get a script that will split a large pdf and detect whether a particular song is 1 page or two page. And by barely, I mean not at all   

As far as inputting vs scanning... I've always found the input to be faster than the scanning applications. But I have a setup that is very conducive to this. I have a 27" vertcal monitor that I use for sheet music so I can make the sheet music pretty large.  Sibelius allows for really fast insertion if you get good at using the keyboard. I can get a full page done in under a minute if the page are sufficiently large.  I tend to prefer to make articulations and that sort of thing at the same time so if there are a lot of them that bogs the process down, but then the product is finsihed when you're done.

I do recommend a part-by-part approach for speed if you choose to go that route.  Reason being you can alt tab between the windows and press page down to get to the next page and when you alt-tab back, your cursor will be in the same position in Sibelius so you can immediately start copying again.

One of the most useful features that I'm surprised hasn't been implemented (maybe is has for all I know) is to take an individual part and superimpose it behind the Sibelius layer so you can input while looking at the same screen. It looks like Photoscore has a sort of similar feature but it's a little pricier than I'm willing to spend at the moment with how little time I have to devote to it at the moment.

Quote from: Matt K on Jan 21, 2018, 06:03AM
One of the most useful features that I'm surprised hasn't been implemented (maybe is has for all I know) is to take an individual part and superimpose it behind the Sibelius layer so you can input while looking at the same screen.


That would be great!  Or, at least a semi-transparent background for entry mode for the notation window.  I wonder if MuseScore would be interested in something like this.

--Andy in OKC

I'll recommend it on their Github page.  They're probably a heck of a lot more responsive than Avid is.  I wish I knew C++ or else I'd probably have contributed a long time ago. I like the idea of not needing to be tethered to Sibelius, but on the other hand, I wasn't really satisfied with the input of any of the open source applications last I tried. They all seemed to be based on Finale in some respect which I find much less useful.  A "Sibelius" mode that would let you choose to make it behave like Sibelius input would probably convert me to MuseScore.  I would have to go through and convert all of my scores to XML though which would be a pita!

Quote from: Matt K on Jan 22, 2018, 04:45AMI'll recommend it on their Github page.  They're probably a heck of a lot more responsive than Avid is.  I wish I knew C++ or else I'd probably have contributed a long time ago. I like the idea of not needing to be tethered to Sibelius, but on the other hand, I wasn't really satisfied with the input of any of the open source applications last I tried. They all seemed to be based on Finale in some respect which I find much less useful.  A "Sibelius" mode that would let you choose to make it behave like Sibelius input would probably convert me to MuseScore.  I would have to go through and convert all of my scores to XML though which would be a pita!

It's been a number of years since I had my hands in C++ but I've been tempted by the MuseScore project to jump back in.  I hope to have a career change at the end of this year, so perhaps that will be the time for me to dust off the C++. 

--Andy in OKC

QuoteOne of the most useful features that I'm surprised hasn't been implemented (maybe is has for all I know) is to take an individual part and superimpose it behind the Sibelius layer so you can input while looking at the same screen.

I will note that there are already utilities that let you make a window transparent to see another window behind it.


This is MuseScore over Photoshop...

Hmmm.  Makes me consider running Musescore under windows.  Thanks for sharing that.

--Andy in OKC

Actually, there was a recommendation a few days ago in the Musescore forums it seems that would be better than the superimposition of something.  As it turns out, it looks pretty messy (I tried to do a mock up in paint and I suppose it could work but not as well as I thought it might). However, the recommendation I saw basically indicated something that was somewhere between the automatic do-everything-all-at-once-automatically parser for PDF files they already have (that often fails because it's super difficult to get a computer to recognize that sort of thing at the moment) and doing it manually.  Basically user-assisted PDF imports which to me is a really good idea. Have it split the music into staves etc. and have it ask when it thinks it isn't more than x% sure of something. 

Hope your career shift works out well.  C++ is on my radar once I get out of grad school. Ugh can't wait to get back to learning things 

Quote from: Matt K on Jan 21, 2018, 06:03AMOne of the most useful features that I'm surprised hasn't been implemented (maybe is has for all I know) is to take an individual part and superimpose it behind the Sibelius layer so you can input while looking at the same screen. It looks like Photoscore has a sort of similar feature but it's a little pricier than I'm willing to spend at the moment with how little time I have to devote to it at the moment.

You can always put your Sibelius in Panorama mode (and if needed focus on staff), minimize your Sibelius window so it is just the height of the staff you're working on and put it at the top or bottom of your screen so you can see the layer behind on most of your screen

Quote from: Matt K on Jan 21, 2018, 06:03AMOne of the most useful features that I'm surprised hasn't been implemented (maybe is has for all I know) is to take an individual part and superimpose it behind the Sibelius layer so you can input while looking at the same screen. It looks like Photoscore has a sort of similar feature but it's a little pricier than I'm willing to spend at the moment with how little time I have to devote to it at the moment.

You can always put your Sibelius in Panorama mode (and if needed focus on staff), minimize your Sibelius window so it is just the height of the staff you're working on and put it at the top or bottom of your screen so you can see the layer behind on most of your screen