I find that scanning music simply "depends." I had reason to require Dvorak's Requiem in Finale a year ago. If I recall the score is about two hundred pages long.
I xeroxed the score, scanned it using a consumer level Epson scanner, OCR'd it using SharpEye and imported it into Finale using MusicXML. I'll be darned if it wasn't bad at all. Sure some accidentals got dinged; occasionally some key signatures short-changed. Using MIDI playback was a simple way to test. Other times, I have scanned recent, very well done scores and ended up with a lot of headache. In my experience the SharpEye/Music XML combo works pretty nicely indeed. The engraving style and accuracy of the scanned piece makes the difference. /Jim -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of dhbailey Sent: Friday, September 10, 2004 6:42 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Finale] Scanner recommendations? Michael J. Barry wrote: > > Does anyone have any recommendations for a good scanner? > I don't need the absolute top of the line, but I don't mind spending > about $250 or so for a really good one. > > What features should I look for? I'd like to be able to > use Finale to scan music in for Smartmusic playback, and also > just to have a good scanner that'd scan photos well. > > I am using Windows XP, SP2... > > Thanks! > "scan music in for Smartmusic playback" isn't as easy as it sounds. First you have you scan the music in, which means that the music scanning software will make its best guess about the dots and lines and stuff, and put that into an intermediary file which Finale will import and then make its best guess before turning it into notation on your monitor. Then you have to go through and check each note/rest/accidental/expression/whatever out and make certain it is correct. Then you have to assign all the voices you want on each staff, and THEN save as a SmartMusic file for playing with the SmartMusic program. Music scanning is still in its infancy, with accuracy rates on perfect originals somewhere around 85%, and for less than perfect originals (say old dog-eared music which was originally hand-engraved) it can be lower than 50%. So buy the scanner because you want a scanner, not specifically for Finale use. But don't expect to go Scan, Import, Save-as-SmartMusic, open-Smartmusic-and-play in just a few clicks. -- David H. Bailey [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
