SmartScore Music-to-XML Music Notation Recognition

I tried the much more expensive PhotoScore and Musitek's own SmartScore X2, as well as the open source Audiveris. SmartScore and PhotoScore are both somewhat better due to their integrated post-recognition editor, but much more expensive. Audiversis, as of this writing, is very much a work in progress and not ready for prime time. Music-To-XML works out of the box, and does a very nice job of recognition. I take it then to MuseScore for cleanup. Irrelevant text (titles, copyrights, etc.) are often messed up, but the music transcription is surprisingly good. Even lyrics are better than I would expect and a quick proof read is all it takes. Usually a few (like 5%) of the measures end up a beat off from missed notes or confused voicing, which are fairly easy to find. A very few notes are incorrect (e.g. D vs E, as opposed to just missing entirely), which are much harder to find - but much more rare, in the last 42 bar piece (three staves) I did there were two. Overall quite good.

The OCR that used to be in Finale was good. This is so much better.

I manage a choral ensemble and up to now, had to enter scores into Finale note-by-note so I could transpose keys and hand out parts to my colleagues. This app has saved me (and will save me) hundreds of hours of tedious work. It's so simple and it's very accurate. I'm not saying it's perfect, but it gets almost everything in the music. I saw that one or two people couldn't make it work. It works for me and I'm very grateful. Nashville Gil

Horrible app for reading and integration of Sheet Music. Any mark on the sheet and it counts it as a note. IF MUSIC is close together it counts it as a multiple staffs not bared as written. Does not know how to count timing. Does not save correctly or save where its told. HAVE to hunt for the file. No choices to change what it does. Waste of Money on something so cheaply written.

main functionality doesn't work

Before you drop $100 on this app, it's important to understand a few key things. First, you'll need to own separate notation software. You'll need to be starting with very clear, high quality scans of sheet music. If the pages on your scans are wavy (such as where the page meets the binding), you're going to get bad results. You may even need to start tearing out pages to get nice flat scans, which is a shame that this software can't automatically straighten out a wavy staff. If your scores are highly marked up, you're going to get bad results. Poor music fonts? Bad results. If your scans are too light, you'll get bad results. However, if you've got clear, flat, high contrast scans (or starting with purchased PDF's) of well laid out scores, this app will work with an impressive degree of accuracy. That said, you'll have to do some clean up in your notation software on just about any score. If this sounds like your particular use-case, you should consider a purchase after demoing.