PhotoScore Lite is included FREE with the Sibelius notation software. To get the benefits shown below, you need to add PhotoScore Ultimate 5. PhotoScore Ultimate 5 builds on the features of PhotoScore Lite in three important areas: reads more, reads faster, and is more accurate. It can also be used with Finale.

PhotoScore Ultimate
…scans and reads printed music. PhotoScore is a music scanning program - the musical equivalent of a text OCR program. Scanning text is difficult for computers to do, and has only achieved reasonable accuracy in the last few years. Music scanning is much harder because of the more complicated range of symbols involved, because of the complex two-dimensional ‘grammar’ of music, and because some markings such as hairpins and phrase-marks are of a variable shape and size.

The difficulty with scanning music or text is that by scanning a page, a computer does not ‘understand’ it. As far as the computer is concerned, scanning a page merely presents it with a grid of millions of black and white dots, which could be music, text, a photograph or anything else. The process of actually reading or interpreting music, text or pictures from this grid of dots is extremely complex and poorly understood. A large part of the human brain, containing many millions of connections, is devoted solely to solving this ‘pattern recognition’ problem. For this reason, only a handful of music scanning programs have ever been developed, and past attempts have generally been very slow, very inaccurate, or unable to recognize many standard musical markings. PhotoScore represents a significant advance, being able to read a wide variety of music with high speed, accuracy and a good range of music symbols.

NOTE: Scanning or recording copyrighted music without permission is illegal. However, some uses such as transposition are covered under the Fair Use provisions of the Copyright Act. Other uses require the written consent of the copyright owner.

PhotoScore Ultimate 5

PhotoScore Ultimate is the new name for PhotoScore Professional and reflects its wealth of powerful new features. Version 5 offers the following major improvements over 4:

Plus the features from prior versions of PhotoScore:

Feature Comparison: PhotoScore Lite and Ultimate Versions

Feature Lite Full
Reads articulation marks no yes
Reads slurs, etc. no yes
Reads hairpins (crescendo/diminuendo) no yes
Reads double & repeat barlines no yes
Reads text (lyrics) no yes
Number of accidental types 3 7
Number of clef types 2 8
Maximum voices per staff 1 2
Maximum staves per page 12 64
Minimum note-value 16th 128th
Maximum number of rhythm dots 1 2
Maximum pages per score 20 400

PhotoScore Ultimate can read most musical markings, including:

  • 5-line staves (normal and small), 4- and 6- line guitar staves, 1-, 2- and 3-line percussion staves -new to v4!
  • Notes (including appoggiaturas and cue-sized notes -new to v4!), chords (including tail direction, beams & flags) and rests in up to 4 voices per staff -new to v4!
  • Accidentals and articulation marks
  • Clefs, key signatures, time signatures
  • Tuplets/triplets
  • The format of the page, including the page size, staff size, margins, and where systems end
  • Slurs, ties and hairpins
  • Text including lyrics, dynamics, fingerings, instrument names, tempo and technique markings
  • Guitar chord diagrams
  • 64 staves per page
  • 400 pages per score

Once the music has been read into PhotoScore, it can be transferred directly into Finale or Sibelius so you can:

  • Edit it further
  • Proof-read it (e.g. just by playing it!)
  • Transpose it
  • Re-arrange it
  • Save it
  • Play it back
  • Print it out
  • Extract parts
File formats produced by PhotoScore Ultimate:
Format Export Limitations
Scanned Music (PhotoScore's native file format) Scanned Music files contain all information picked up by PhotoScore.
MusicXML Information about guitar chord diagrams (guitar frames) is not stored, in addition to the position of absolute text (e.g. title, composer, lyricist). Only the first instance of absolute text is stored.
NIFF NIFF files contain all information picked up by PhotoScore.
MIDI

(Almost all music programs can import this format.) MIDI files are primarily designed for playback and not notation. There are certain types of musical features that cannot be stored as distinguishable objects. Instead these are intelligently simulated by PhotoScore and include articulation marks, accidentals, clefs, time signatures, key signatures, ties and dynamics.

Pricing

PhotoScore Lite: Included FREE with Sibelius

PhotoScore Ultimate 5: $249


Bundle Offers PhotoScore Ultimate 5 with Sibelius 5: $479

 

Order on PO or institutional billing

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