Howdy, I know the subject h
 

Hi, Sherry: Have you been t
 

Hi, Sherry:

Have you been to this site: www.halcyondaysmusic.com ?

Lots of old parlour stuff, scanned or manually entered from sheetmusic, up to about 1920.

As a matter of fact, it's a source for a lot of the songs in a "musical melodrama" that I'm creating from a 1903 play, called The Lure of the Lights or Why Women Sin.

I haven't got to the sinning part, yet.

Howdy David, Yes, been ther
 

Hello, I have just purchased
 

Hello,
I have just purchased Midinotate Composer. I would like to scan some sheet music and have it saved as a midi file for imput into Midinotate. Please advise me about the best software and scanner to achieve good results. Thanks

Fiona

Hello Anonymous, Sherry has
 

Hello Anonymous,

Sherry has been happy with an inexpensive music scanner available at http://www.neuratron.com/photoscore.htm. A few days ago I tried it, but ran into an installation problem of some sort that prevented me from successfully using it.

Two high-end music scanners are available from Musitek and SharpEye. You can export MIDI from them, and read the MIDI in MidiNotate Composer; but MIDI only saves information about what notes are played in what staves, and doesn't save information about music symbols such as dynamic marks.

Musitek and SharpEye also export MusicXML, which is a standard file format that preserves additional music notation symbol information, such as dynamic marks. MidiNotate Composer is overdue in supporting MusicXML. Nevertheless, you might still be happy with using Composer and MIDI export from a music scanner app.

Music scanning technology isn't as automatic as one might hope. It takes a lot of hand holding. So, the fact that Composer doesn't import all of the extra music symbols, such as dynamic marks and accent marks read by a music scanner, isn't as much of a problem as it might sound. It might even be a blessing in disguise. I suspect that it's easier, quicker, and less stressful for a Composer user to quickly manually add accent and dynamic marks and such, on top of the imported notes from a music scanner, than it is for the user of another music notation problem to correct all of the music scanning mistakes. I'm not making up this story. I've heard several folk say that they just scan notes, and nothing else from music scores, when they're working with other music notation programs.

Cheer

Howdy folks, Mark is indeed
 

Howdy folks,

Mark is indeed correct that you can find the exact same deal that I found (I have v 3.1x, and this one is 4.0, though) at http://www.neuratron.com/photoscore.htm

Scroll to the bottom of the page, and then follow the "order now click _here_", where "_here_" is a text link. You can then proceed to purchase it (it is download only) for $24. They seem to run this special only intermittently (that I've seen, though I don't keep regular tabs on their page), and from what I saw when I was looking for a scanning program earlier this year, this is pretty cheap. Other programs run about $100, and this one normally sells for $49 according to the page.

It works well for what I want to do, which is to scan in sheet music that I can then save as a .mid file to open in Composer. This version only reads notes (not performance marks or chord charts) on the staves that you select, and it will (contrary to what their description says for my version anyway) read two voices per staff. It will either read a page from your scanner, or .bmp files, and will save the results (after you edit them) as .mid.

The interface for correcting reading mistakes is quite nice, and it allows you to correct things and listen to it before saving the "read" score as a .mid. While you are editing, the mouse cursor moves along the score that it has "read" while simultaneously showing a cursor moving along the scanned picture of the original, which makes corrections very easy to make. You don't have to go back and forth between the scanned picture of the score and the editable score that will be saved as the .mid file.

The users' guide is a bit sketchy, but does give you the information that you need to successfully scan, read (ie, let the software interpret the file into sheet music), and export a .mid file so that you can work with it in MidiNotate.

Photoscore MIDI Lite is just a simple scanning program with export to MIDI only, but at the current price of $24, it's a great app for MidiNotate users. I've thoroughly enjoyed using it.

ttfn,
Sherry