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View Full Version : Interest survey for including a scanning/OCR feature in Notation Composer -reply here


Sherry C
10-13-2016, 03:11 PM
Hello friends,

We are currently exploring many different paths for future development. One feature that has been requested in the past is the capability to scan sheet music or read electronic files (eg. PDF or image files) and have that sheet music entered as a .not song file in Notation Composer.

Since a feature like this obviously takes development effort as well as licensing costs from third party developers who create and maintain the software for such a feature, we would like to find out


if you are interested in such a feature and
how much you would be willing to pay for such a feature.


Please keep in mind that the current field for such software ranges from about $60 usd for stand-alone scanner/reader software that will read up to 12 staves per page for a piano score (does not do multiple instruments) and exports a MIDI file (ie. just the notes) to about $250 for stand-alone software that will read orchestral scores and export MusicXML (ie, notes for multiple instruments and annotations.)

Thanks for your input here - we appreciate feedback from our musicians to help us determine what really matters to you :)

Best regards,
Your Notation Software Team

rrayner
10-14-2016, 02:55 AM
This seems an easy answer. If I look on Amazon for the other leaders in music notation software, I see:

Finale 2014 - $470
Sibelius 8 Professional - $504
Neuratron PhotoScore Ultimate 8 - $229.99
Notation Composer - $98.99

Finale and Sibelius do not have the feature you are talking about, unless I am missing by not digging deeply into the current releases. Neuratron is somewhat capable of doing what you are proposing (which I think would be wonderful), but if you want to easily and freely modify Neuratron's output, you need to export it to Sibelius to massage the content. Pretty expensive, and from personal experience, I have tried scanning both hand-written scores and professionally printed sheet music, and the output STILL needs a lot of massaging to make the music playable. I have had extended experience with that scenario: Neuratron to Sibelius to Notation Composer (via midi export) -- a tedious task and not very complete.

Neuratron to Notation Composer, skipping Sibelius, has not been very effective either. There is really no good software to do what you propose, unless I am living under a rock (which could be -- I would be happy to find out about something new I haven't heard about).

I own all four software products, even though I am not terribly fluent in the non-Composer apps. I have found Composer to be hands-down the best notation software out there. How much would I be willing to pay above the current Composer price? There is a large gap between less than $100 and the prices of the other apps, particularly if you want to include the Neuratron piece. In the $400 range, it would be very attractive, assuming the score-scanning capability, but I am assuming that you would like to target the $200 range.

Ralph Rayner

dj
10-14-2016, 03:22 PM
My 2/100ths of a dollar.

Are you talking about re-pricing Composer? If so, I'm not sure that the average user would have enough need for the scanning feature to make up the price break.

I have an ancient version of the Sharp Eye scanning software that I've used, like, twice. I see that it's $163 US at the moment. I have used it to create midis, then brought them into Composer. As Ralph says, that then takes a lot of massaging to make it work.

Having said that I don't use it, I realize that I could have made very extensive use of it last spring when I transcribed a couple of hundred pages from sheet music. I just never thought of it and played it manually into Composer. On the other hand, that sheet music was often very old (19th century) and scanning software probably wouldn't have been very effective with it.

I wonder whether some deal with a scanning software company, such as Visiv (Sharp Eye) that would allow direct import into Composer from their program might be a better solution than an incorporated scanning feature.

Just some thoughts.

David

Reinhold H.
10-16-2016, 10:16 AM
Thanks for the comments so far.

Let me add here how the concept will look like and what corner stones need to be met:


Definitely, we cannot enhance our prices for Composer because of a scanning feature
Secondly, we cannot develop a scanning feature by our own

The concept would be to use Visiv's scanning engine (http://www.visiv.co.uk/tech.htm) which is the same as the scanning engine of SharpEye.
MusicXML import is planned to be one of the core features in the next release (just want to mention that it is "planned" and not yet confirmed :)). So the interface from the scanning engine to Composer would be MusicXML. MusicXML offers a far wider feature range than a MIDI export/import. The MusicXML export of Visiv is pretty OK from what I have tested so far.

The scanning engine would be part of any Composer package including the trial version. The scanning engine will expire after 30 days. If the user is convinced of the OCR scanning feature he/she can purchase a scanning license. This license will be loaded by Composer without a re-installation and the scanning feature is activated

Visiv's scanning engine only imports a 1-bit bmp format (just black and white). The feature would be that any other format like pdf, jpg etc. can be used. The integration would be as such that opening a pdf, jpg etc. would be possible and all other converions happen in the background.

Clearly, the notation score can only be as good as the scanning enging of SharpEye. Any adjustments due to a bad scanning need to be made in Composer.

Our questionare is about "what a customer would be willing to pay for this additional scanning feature".
This question is crucial to us due to the Visiv's license prices because this is the only royalty costs which we have so far.

Reinhold

rrayner
10-17-2016, 03:32 PM
Okay, Reinhold, interesting expansion concept. I like it. Why raise the price Composer for folks who wouldn't be using the scan feature. Brilliant!

So, now that you have shed a little more light on your approach, let me revise my views. The current Amazon price for Neuratron PhotoScore Ultimate 8 is $229.99, which is misleading, because from what I know, you also have to have Sibelius in order to get any kind of flexible editing of the scanned music.

So, if you add the $504 cost of Sibelius, you would have to pay $733.99 to get an almost workable capture -- for folks who would like the scan feature in Composer, that gives you a very wide margin between your Composer cost of $98.99 and Photoscore/Sibelius cost of $733.99.

As far as I am concerned, the $229.99 I paid for Photoscore is NOT worth it. I use it very little. I have some simple lead sheets that I will try again on, just to see if more frequent use makes me more proficient with it.

I hope this helps.

Ralph Rayner

Reinhold H.
10-18-2016, 06:30 AM
Ralph, thanks for your comments.

The scanning quality of the concept would be exactly the same as the scanning quality of SharpEye 2 which uses the Liszt OCR scanning engine.
The technical concept basically is to export a MusicXML file by the Liszt OCR engine and import this MusicXML file into Composer.

There is a long thread about the best scanning OCR engine in the forum of the MuseScore folks. Unfortunately (or fortunately :)) it is in German language where people contributed who did intensive testing and validations. Please find the thread here (https://musescore.org/de/node/14795). SharpEye sounds OK and the testing that I did was OK, too for the music sheet that I used. I can recommend to try the SharpEye 2 trial version which you can download from the Visiv page (http://www.visiv.co.uk/dload.htm). If somebody tries it, just compare the scanned score to your original music sheet and let us know what you think about the scanned quality.

From a technical platform perspective the beauty using the Liszt OCR engine is that we can perfectly use it across all platfroms which we support from Windows XP to Windows 10, Mac and Linux.

Reinhold

rrayner
10-19-2016, 03:02 PM
Hi Reinhold,

I hope this reply won't clutter this thread with unwanted data, but I just tried another Photoscore 8 to Sibelius 7 to Composer capture, and I thought you might be interested in the results.

Included are the .pdf file (Internet), the .mid file (exported from Sibelius), and the .not file (Composer). I could not upload the .opt file (from Photoscore), but I don't think that is too important.

As you will see, the bar is not set very high. As you are considering the SharpEye approach, adding this update to this thread may be meaningless -- just giving you some insight into your competition.

Ralph Rayner

Reinhold H.
10-19-2016, 06:15 PM
Ralph, Thanks for sharing.

Those files are important in order to validate the scanning results. PhotoScore also uses the SharpEye's engine with some enhancements. I took your PDF file, convert it to bmp and ran it through SharpEye. SharpEye is not able to properly scan the treble piano part (2nd part). The first upper part is accurately detected. This finding is important.
The scenario having the MIDI file in the chain makes it worth due to the midi file nature. So, the result here is - the SharpEye engine cannot scan this PDF file properly.

Reinhold

rrayner
10-22-2016, 08:48 PM
Reinhold - are you interested in seeing any more Photoscore Ultimate to Sibelius to midi files? I am currently working on a couple of Recorder Duets and using this procedure to save time in Composer.

I could include them in this thread or send them in a separate email if you think they would be of any help. I am scanning pages from a fake book. I am going through the work on my own anyway, so there would be little effort to send them to you. Let me know.

Ralph Rayner

dj
11-24-2016, 01:20 PM
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
02-25-2017, 02:07 AM
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
02-27-2017, 04:02 PM
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
03-21-2017, 07:13 PM
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
03-24-2017, 04:00 PM
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
03-24-2017, 04:08 PM
...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.
04-05-2017, 11:03 AM
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 (https://www.w3.org/community/music-notation/2016/05/19/introducing-mnx/).

Reinhold