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Right now, MusicXML is the best way to communicate musical scores between music notation programs.
On your Mac or PC, this might include Finale, Sibelius, MuseScore, or other programs.
Music-to-MXL Owners. Or simply save the MusicXML file to your desktop and it’s ready to open into. Download and convert practically any PDF music file from.
On your iPad, this might include Notion or Symphony Pro. Or, in a round about way, a Music XML could be imported into your Mac or PC program, and then exported to be used on the Finale Songbook, Avid Scorch Reader, or MuseScore Reader on your iPad. You can also read (and now hear) those scores on an app called SeeScore.
Everybody still with me? Good.
Still, how do you get printed music from the page into your digital device while in a music notation format?
Finale and Sibelius have bundled programs, SmartScore and PhotoScore, respectively, that are very limited in what they can do. There are pro versions of each app that are much more expensive and are much more accurate–plus they can handle scores in PDF format (although SmartScore converts those files to a TIFF file). Or, if you have a PDF generated by a music notation product, you can buy another MAC/PC program entitled PDFtoMusic. As with SmartScore and PhotoScore, there is a “pro” version of PDFtoMusic as well. All three can import text, but I find proper hyphenation (when importing into Finale) to be a huge problem that exists with all three programs.
So what is the best program to buy, and what’s the best route to take in conversion?
Here are some thoughts that might be useful:
- I’m highly doubtful about SmartScore. If you go on their website, they haven’t even updated the product since July of 2010. That means no patches, no nod towards OS 10.6 (Lion) or OS 10.7 (Mountain Lion) or Windows 8. I’ve personally sent e-mails and asked, “Are there any updates coming” to which I’ve received no response (I don’t suppose that I merit a response, but customer service and a short note is always good business). Compared to PhotoScore Ultimate, I’ve found SmartScore Pro to be less accurate–with every scan. I can’t recommend it as a product. Editing scores within SmartScore Pro is a nightmare, and one of the negative aspects about Finale is that it doesn’t highlight where measures are incomplete, or where measures have too many beats. So you get that information in SmartScore, but editing those scores before importing is a nightmare. It’s just too easy to make mistakes and those errors can hide too easily.
- I’ve been pretty happy with PhotoScore Ultimate, which although it is usually bundled with Sibelius, it can save files directly to the MusicXML format. As with any music recognition program, the more complex the piece, the more mistakes the program makes. As with SmartScore, I find it easier to edit a score in Finale (which again fails to tell you which measures have too few or too many beats) than in PhotoScore, but PhotoScore does seem to be more friendly when it comes to editing.
- PDFtoMusic Pro is a question mark, as it can only interpret scores created by a music notation program. This means that anything that you simply scan cannot be read by PDFtoMusic Pro. On generated pieces, I’ve found the program to be highly successful with PDFs I create myself, but interpretation of resources on CPDL, for example, tend to be a mixed bag.
I don’t scan songs to MusicXML to redistribute or to sell; I scan them so I can make customizable rehearsal resources for myself and for my students. With SmartMusic, I am also able to make assessments for my students from those same resources.
If you are looking for the best sheet music to digital music (notation) program, I have to recommend PhotoScore Ultimate at this time, which is $249. I cannot recommend SmartScore, which has not been updated since July of 2010–that’s more than two years. PDFtoMusic Pro seems to fill a niche if you have access to generated scores, and costs $199.
Again, the more simple the arrangement, the more accurate the resulting MusicXML file. Very complex scores can require the complete re-entry of all notes in the piece.
If you have an Android of an iOS smartphone or a tablet that takes a good image there is now a way to scan sheet music straight into your PC or Mac far more cheaply than by buying one of the heavyweight music scanning apps. The answer PlayScore. Even though PlayScore is an app it actually contains an incredibly powerful music scanning engine. You can get a pretty excellent result by just snapping a page of music with the device camera. But even higher quality can be got by pointing PlayScore at a good quality scan or at a music image obtained online. The images have to be JPGs, one page per image.
Once you have your images ready, say on your PC the best way to do this is to hook your Android device up to the PC and open two File Explorer windows. The first one shows the download directory on the device, the other the image directory on the PC. First drag the images to the download window. Now switch to the device and bring up PlayScore Pro (it has to be PlayScore Pro because Lite doesn’t have the MusicXML output).
Its then simply a matter of running the images through Plascore Pro one at a time. And that couldn’t be simpler. Tap the disk icon, select the image and tap the eye button, and when it’s done, save. The MusicXML file(s) will then be sitting right there in your PC File Explorer window – the one showing the download directory. Drag them to the local window and there it is on your PC, ready to drop into any of the free music notation programs such as MuseScore. Magic!