Convert to MIDI from scanscore

I don't use scan score as I use Sibelius and cubase and use sibelius's version, but I guess the process will be similar. It's frankly a long winded pain in the rear. The software that scans the image gives you some control over the events it scans and then I import it to my score package which gives me some more editing possibilities. Once I've corrected the reading errors, I then export it as a midi file and then I bring that into cubase and spend more time making it sound good, rather than look good. So that's the usual process. Scan it. Repair the reading errors. Make it work visually. Export this as midi and then fix the aural errors. One piece last week of 40 bars of six instruments took two days.
 
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Hello,

As far as I'm aware, the ScanScore software does not know about midi. So this will be no more than step 1 of a longer process.

ScanScore can read from a score, and can save the data, but it uses the MusicXML data format, which is a very verbose text format. Apart from needing to make the various adjustments noted already, you would then need another application that will allow the import of the MusicXML data, followed by the export of a midi file.

The application MuseScore I know is capable of importing MusicXML, and saving the data as midi. MuseScore will also allow the editing of the data while it's loaded, via a score display if need be. Other packages may well be able to do the same thing, and it would be a help to find something you're already comfortable with.

How much adjustment you'll need to do may well depend on the nature/complexity of the music you're working on. You also have the choice as to which stage of the process you make adjustments, again, this will depend on how comfortable you are with the various levels of software. You could amend the MusicXML data (plain text), the intermediate data as imported into the second system, or the midi file as loaded into the final stage.

Geoff
 
Hello,

I recently saw a piece of 'spam' regarding ScanScore 2, recently released. As I understand the advert, the new version is improved, and this includes the ability to directly export Midi files, so the new version may make your task easier?

Geoff
 
If anyone has any system set up to read a piece of published sheet music and then produce a MIDI file from it, they'll soon discover how horrible and unmusical these files are - unless you spend a long time editing it.

Many moons ago I was heavily involved with a UK exam system where one of the tasks was to convert a piece of pop music and a piece of classical music into a computer project - Early versions of cubase mainly (Cubasis, or Cubase Lite) where they did have scoring editors. The candidates got marks for making it musical, and those that tried to use Sibelius did really badly. Competent musicians many of them, but the scores looked wonderful and sounded simply terrible. Nothing really has changed. A crochet (¼ note) has a fixed velocity and a fixed length - so string four of them in a bar and you have something impossible to achieve by a real musician, where every one is slightly different in length, volume and starting point. In the exam, the musicality was what got marks, and clearly many spent their time getting notes in to look like the score, and no time at all making it sound human. Examiners would click on a list edit page and see hundreds of identical notes, and be unable to award any of the musical or stylistic marks.

In my brief experiments with current scan to MIDI software, the accuracy of identifying the notes in a heavily clustered stave have vastly improved, but timing and note lengths are fixed, and that has to be done manually. We used to tell people that Cubase was pretty rough at producing scores from played in music, and Sibelius was the same at producing musical sounding music from dots on a page. They've both got better, but still they are for different purposes.
 
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