Interest survey for including a scanning/OCR feature in Notation Composer -reply here

[rrayner]

This seems an easy answer. If I look on Amazon for the other leaders in music notation software, I see:

Finale 2014 - $470
Sibelius 8 Professional - $504
Neuratron PhotoScore Ultimate 8 - $229.99
Notation Composer - $98.99

Finale and Sibelius do not have the feature you are talking about, unless I am missing by not digging deeply into the current releases. Neuratron is somewhat capable of doing what you are proposing (which I think would be wonderful), but if you want to easily and freely modify Neuratron's output, you need to export it to Sibelius to massage the content. Pretty expensive, and from personal experience, I have tried scanning both hand-written scores and professionally printed sheet music, and the output STILL needs a lot of massaging to make the music playable. I have had extended experience with that scenario: Neuratron to Sibelius to Notation Composer (via midi export) -- a tedious task and not very complete.

Neuratron to Notation Composer, skipping Sibelius, has not been very effective either. There is really no good software to do what you propose, unless I am living under a rock (which could be -- I would be happy to find out about something new I haven't heard about).

I own all four software products, even though I am not terribly fluent in the non-Composer apps. I have found Composer to be hands-down the best notation software out there. How much would I be willing to pay above the current Composer price? There is a large gap between less than $100 and the prices of the other apps, particularly if you want to include the Neuratron piece. In the $400 range, it would be very attractive, assuming the score-scanning capability, but I am assuming that you would like to target the $200 range.

Ralph Rayner

[dj]

My 2/100ths of a dollar.

Are you talking about re-pricing Composer? If so, I'm not sure that the average user would have enough need for the scanning feature to make up the price break.

I have an ancient version of the Sharp Eye scanning software that I've used, like, twice. I see that it's $163 US at the moment. I have used it to create midis, then brought them into Composer. As Ralph says, that then takes a lot of massaging to make it work.

Having said that I don't use it, I realize that I could have made very extensive use of it last spring when I transcribed a couple of hundred pages from sheet music. I just never thought of it and played it manually into Composer. On the other hand, that sheet music was often very old (19th century) and scanning software probably wouldn't have been very effective with it.

I wonder whether some deal with a scanning software company, such as Visiv (Sharp Eye) that would allow direct import into Composer from their program might be a better solution than an incorporated scanning feature.

Just some thoughts.

David

[Reinhold H.]

Thanks for the comments so far.

Let me add here how the concept will look like and what corner stones need to be met:

• Definitely, we cannot enhance our prices for Composer because of a scanning feature
• Secondly, we cannot develop a scanning feature by our own

The concept would be to use Visiv's scanning engine which is the same as the scanning engine of SharpEye.
MusicXML import is planned to be one of the core features in the next release (just want to mention that it is "planned" and not yet confirmed ). So the interface from the scanning engine to Composer would be MusicXML. MusicXML offers a far wider feature range than a MIDI export/import. The MusicXML export of Visiv is pretty OK from what I have tested so far.

The scanning engine would be part of any Composer package including the trial version. The scanning engine will expire after 30 days. If the user is convinced of the OCR scanning feature he/she can purchase a scanning license. This license will be loaded by Composer without a re-installation and the scanning feature is activated

Visiv's scanning engine only imports a 1-bit bmp format (just black and white). The feature would be that any other format like pdf, jpg etc. can be used. The integration would be as such that opening a pdf, jpg etc. would be possible and all other converions happen in the background.

Clearly, the notation score can only be as good as the scanning enging of SharpEye. Any adjustments due to a bad scanning need to be made in Composer.

Our questionare is about "what a customer would be willing to pay for this additional scanning feature".
This question is crucial to us due to the Visiv's license prices because this is the only royalty costs which we have so far.

Reinhold

[rrayner]

Okay, Reinhold, interesting expansion concept. I like it. Why raise the price Composer for folks who wouldn't be using the scan feature. Brilliant!

So, now that you have shed a little more light on your approach, let me revise my views. The current Amazon price for Neuratron PhotoScore Ultimate 8 is $229.99, which is misleading, because from what I know, you also have to have Sibelius in order to get any kind of flexible editing of the scanned music.

So, if you add the $504 cost of Sibelius, you would have to pay $733.99 to get an almost workable capture -- for folks who would like the scan feature in Composer, that gives you a very wide margin between your Composer cost of $98.99 and Photoscore/Sibelius cost of $733.99.

As far as I am concerned, the $229.99 I paid for Photoscore is NOT worth it. I use it very little. I have some simple lead sheets that I will try again on, just to see if more frequent use makes me more proficient with it.

I hope this helps.

Ralph Rayner

[Reinhold H.]

Ralph, thanks for your comments.

The scanning quality of the concept would be exactly the same as the scanning quality of SharpEye 2 which uses the Liszt OCR scanning engine.
The technical concept basically is to export a MusicXML file by the Liszt OCR engine and import this MusicXML file into Composer.

There is a long thread about the best scanning OCR engine in the forum of the MuseScore folks. Unfortunately (or fortunately ) it is in German language where people contributed who did intensive testing and validations. Please find the thread here. SharpEye sounds OK and the testing that I did was OK, too for the music sheet that I used. I can recommend to try the SharpEye 2 trial version which you can download from the Visiv page. If somebody tries it, just compare the scanned score to your original music sheet and let us know what you think about the scanned quality.

From a technical platform perspective the beauty using the Liszt OCR engine is that we can perfectly use it across all platfroms which we support from Windows XP to Windows 10, Mac and Linux.

Reinhold

[rrayner]

Hi Reinhold,

I hope this reply won't clutter this thread with unwanted data, but I just tried another Photoscore 8 to Sibelius 7 to Composer capture, and I thought you might be interested in the results.

Included are the .pdf file (Internet), the .mid file (exported from Sibelius), and the .not file (Composer). I could not upload the .opt file (from Photoscore), but I don't think that is too important.

As you will see, the bar is not set very high. As you are considering the SharpEye approach, adding this update to this thread may be meaningless -- just giving you some insight into your competition.

Ralph Rayner

[Reinhold H.]

Ralph, Thanks for sharing.

Those files are important in order to validate the scanning results. PhotoScore also uses the SharpEye's engine with some enhancements. I took your PDF file, convert it to bmp and ran it through SharpEye. SharpEye is not able to properly scan the treble piano part (2nd part). The first upper part is accurately detected. This finding is important.
The scenario having the MIDI file in the chain makes it worth due to the midi file nature. So, the result here is - the SharpEye engine cannot scan this PDF file properly.

Reinhold