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

[dj]

Hi, guys and gals:

Replying to your request about scanning quality, Reinhold, it's been a long time since I did any serious scanning and the copy of Sharp Eye that I have is very old.

What I do remember is a lot of editing of each scan's resulting page (.MRO files) to get things more in shape, and then assembling the resulting files into one .mid file.

I've gone back and found the archive of the show that I used Sharp Eye to assemble and I've attached two files here. The .mid file is the result of the scanning process, after considerable hand editing, and the .not file is the final product. This, by the way, was scanned from a printed score.

And, the cost is a lot. I think maybe the high cost of music scanning software reflects the relative demand for it: when you need the capability, you really need it, but have to be prepared to pay for "niche" software.

Hope that helps.

David

[kknollman]

Hello.
It looks like this thread has not had a reply for several months, but I want to add a few notes from my experience. I had purchased PhotoScore quite some time ago to pair up with my original version of Composer, but my experience with it was very unsatisfactory. I remember it taking more time to edit the conversion than to create the score in Composer manually. I also tried SharpEye several years ago, but found it less satisfactory than I had expected.

Two years ago I purchased Capella-Scan, and find this to have a very satisfactory success rate recognizing scores. Where it senses errors by improperly recognizing some notation, it drops various color coded hints into the on-screen notation to aid in manually correcting recognition errors. The cost is in the $250 range.

I input pdf scores into Capella, and although I currently output them as midi files because that is the only format I can input to Composer, it does output to MusicXML, and I am anxiously awaiting the capability to input that format into Composer.

-Ken

[Sherry C]

Hi Ken,

Thanks very much for your input here. We have indeed decided that rather than try to work on an internal scan-to-notation utility (which is a HUGE project), that we would focus on having MusicXML import for just the reason that you have mentioned

We do not have a schedule in place for that yet because even having MusicXML import is a large project, especially given the still-varying standards of MusicXML, but we do see this as our next big goal for Notation Composer.

Thanks,
Sherry

[rrayner]

Neuratron just came out with 8.8.2 of PhotoScore Ultimate. I scanned a PDF, exported to XML, opened with Sibelius, exported to MID, opened with Notation Composer. It looks and sounds pretty good.

Ralph Rayner

[Sherry C]

Hi Ralph,

Thanks for that assessment! We're looking more closely at the MusicXML export and import, so this is indeed helpful information

ttfn,
Sherry

[rrayner]

...but a lot depends on the crispness of the PDF. "Rock of Ages" is very clean. Other PDFs I have that aren't as crisp turn out unusable garbage. RRR

[Reinhold H.]

Hi all,

First of all thanks to all the comments.

We have been investigating the concept of scanning using the scanning engine of SharpEye 2 (which also made it partly into PhotoScore) for several months. The findings about the scanning quality are pretty close to what has been reported here in this thread. In addition we had negotiations with the Visiv Ltd, a UK company which is owned by Neuratron Ltd about licensing the engine. Unfortunately we were unable to reach agreement on the license pricing and other conditions. The required license prices, the upfront costs as well as our own development expenses for an integration simply do not justify such an integrated feature.

We therefore decided not to further pursue this feature option of an integrated scanning feature any longer. We will focus our energy on MusicXML import and the next new format of MNX.

Reinhold