Hello Anonymous,

Sherry has been happy with an inexpensive music scanner available at http://www.neuratron.com/photoscore.htm. A few days ago I tried it, but ran into an installation problem of some sort that prevented me from successfully using it.

Two high-end music scanners are available from Musitek and SharpEye. You can export MIDI from them, and read the MIDI in MidiNotate Composer; but MIDI only saves information about what notes are played in what staves, and doesn't save information about music symbols such as dynamic marks.

Musitek and SharpEye also export MusicXML, which is a standard file format that preserves additional music notation symbol information, such as dynamic marks. MidiNotate Composer is overdue in supporting MusicXML. Nevertheless, you might still be happy with using Composer and MIDI export from a music scanner app.

Music scanning technology isn't as automatic as one might hope. It takes a lot of hand holding. So, the fact that Composer doesn't import all of the extra music symbols, such as dynamic marks and accent marks read by a music scanner, isn't as much of a problem as it might sound. It might even be a blessing in disguise. I suspect that it's easier, quicker, and less stressful for a Composer user to quickly manually add accent and dynamic marks and such, on top of the imported notes from a music scanner, than it is for the user of another music notation problem to correct all of the music scanning mistakes. I'm not making up this story. I've heard several folk say that they just scan notes, and nothing else from music scores, when they're working with other music notation programs.

Cheer