an App for playing sheet music

nalooti · 03-16-2019, 05:34 PM

Hi,

Can you please point me to a decent app for playing sheet music preferably free ? I tested playscore but it has limitations.

Also I'd be very interested to know if doing the inverse is possible. That is, playing a melody (e.g. on guitar) resulting in a written piece (notes or tabs) by a software.

On Reaper it should be possible to get the notes and put them on a piano roll (MIDI item). Is there any plugin able to write them in a score ?

thanks

hopi · 03-16-2019, 08:42 PM

reaper can write them in a score... well to some degree...

go to midi editor and then to notation view

Sibelius would be something to look into

moribund · 03-17-2019, 12:16 PM

Almost any notation program should be able to create a score from a MIDI file. It often takes a fair amount of effort to clean it up and get it looking presentable though.

TonE · 03-17-2019, 01:29 PM

MidiOptimizer

alanofoz · 03-17-2019, 01:36 PM

Not exactly what you want but google for music OCR or OMR. That'll get you from sheet music to MIDI or MusicXML. Then you can play it. There are several programs, probably not cheap.

peter5992 · 03-18-2019, 02:23 AM

1. Sheet music to playback: easiest is obviously a group of skilled musicians (duh) but in the absence of that you can scan sheetmusic with a program like Photoscore, and then import it into Sibelius. The results really depend on the quality of the score, if the score is poorly legible you'll have to do a lot of cleaning up; at some point it may be easier to just manually transcribe everything. Also, Photoscore does not handle polyphonic / complex music very well, again better to do it by hand.

Once in Sibelius you can play it back with the built in sounds, or NotePerformer, etc.

2. The other way, from audio to score, there's audioscore which converts it from audo into midi, and then you import the midi into Sibelius or other notation programs.

Importing midi into Sibelius in general usually requires a lot of cleaning up, quantizing notes etc., keyswitches which have to be removed.

bjohn · 03-18-2019, 03:15 AM

Most of the software I've used to scan and play sheet music has failed miserably, maybe a 20 percent success rate. I've tried apps for the Mac and Windows, and iOS.

My solution is to retranscribe sheet music into an app that can play the melody back for me (I learn most music by ear, I'm not much good at sight reading despite being a musician for 40 years). I learned abc notation many years ago so am pretty efficient at looking at sheet music and writing it out in abc. Most abc software will render the sheet music in real time as you write out the notes in abc so you can QA your work, and then it'll play it back in MIDI. You can then export the MIDI file and open it in Reaper and use whatever virtual instrument you like.

nalooti · 03-19-2019, 07:57 AM

Thanks to all for your replies.

Quote:

Originally Posted by bjohn

Most of the software I've used to scan and play sheet music has failed miserably, maybe a 20 percent success rate. I've tried apps for the Mac and Windows, and iOS.

My solution is to retranscribe sheet music into an app that can play the melody back for me (I learn most music by ear, I'm not much good at sight reading despite being a musician for 40 years).
I learned abc notation many years ago so am pretty efficient at looking at sheet music and writing it out in abc. Most abc software will render the sheet music in real time as you write out the notes in abc so you can QA your work, and then it'll play it back in MIDI. You can then export the MIDI file and open it in Reaper and use whatever virtual instrument you like.

bjohn, I agree with you about the software and I understand that you re-write the sheet music because of the soft inefficiency on reading the scanned original sheet.

I understand you have a good workaround for this but I don't exactly understand what it is.
What do you mean by abc notation and abc software ? Can you please tell me what is yours ? A quick recipe of your solution would be great.

Many thanks

lunker · 03-19-2019, 08:17 AM

ABC: http://abc.sourceforge.net/

Wow! I haven't used that in years, but remember it fondly.

If you prefer a free GUI notation editor, you might consider MuseScore: https://musescore.org/en

I was a hard-core Finale user until it starting having problems with the security apps on my PC, and have found that MuseScore is pretty good, and didn't take too long to get used to.

bjohn · 03-19-2019, 08:50 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by nalooti

What do you mean by abc notation and abc software ? Can you please tell me what is yours ? A quick recipe of your solution would be great.

I use EasyABC, which is a free abc editor for Windows. I don't think there's any ABC software available for Mac anymore. Learning to write abc is kind of like learning to write HTML code (but a lot simpler). I believe it was invented for sending sheet music by email back when bandwidth was a concern.

A typical abc transcription of a tune looks like this (this is a common traditional Irish reel).

X: 1
T: Drowsy Maggie
R: reel
M: 4/4
L: 1/8
K: Edor
|:E2BE dEBE|E2BE AFDF|E2BE dEBE|BABc dAFD:|
d2fd c2ec|defg afge|d2fd c2ec|BABc dAFA|
d2fd c2ec|defg afge|afge fdec|BABc dAFD|

bjohn · 03-19-2019, 08:58 AM

There are also applications for hand-writing sheet music on a tablet computer, such as StaffPad (https://www.staffpad.net/). I bought this when it came out and could never get it to work and finally deleted it from my Surface Tablet. Getting the notes to come out where you wanted them was a hit-and-miss affair, mostly miss, and it would have taken me about 4 hours to correctly transcribe a single page of music. Don't waste your money!

Antinus · 10-21-2019, 01:43 PM

PlayScore is now much more advanced and is called PlayScore 2 (Apple only).
You can scan many pages, PDF scores and images. Its just like playing a record!
You can separate parts, orchestrate your score with different instruments. Export MusicXML with dynamics, articulation etc.
And the recognition system which was always good has improved greatly.

You can download it free on an iPhone or iPad from the App Store. Website https://playscore.co

martifingers · 10-22-2019, 02:46 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by peter5992

2. The other way, from audio to score, there's audioscore which converts it from audo into midi, and then you import the midi into Sibelius or other notation programs.

.

Not much love for audioscore here:https://www.amazon.com/Neuratron-Aud...ews/B005H3I0DE
but perhaps it has improved?
And Kenny covers guitar to MIDI here of course:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8D2jEhbN7Y