Music-to-XML gives you a few options as it processes the file. For larger files, you’ll see a progress bar. I thought I’d start by using that same test file in Music-to-XML, and then sending it to Finale.įor a small file like this, recognition is virtually instantaneous. Working with Music-to-XMLĬommendably, MakeMusic has kept their initial blog post and video available, along with the test file and unedited Finale result that Mark Adler used in his demonstration. It doesn’t access the embedded fonts, characters, or underlying data in the document the way PDFtoMusic Pro, an app which only works on PDFs created directly from music software, does. In other words, it “sees” the document the same way a human would.
PDFTOMUSIC PRO ONE STAFF AT A TIME PDF
However, if a PDF file can be opened without a password but it’s print-restricted, it will work just fine in Music-to-XML, because the software converts the PDF to an image anyway. Notably, Music-to-XML will not read a PDF file with an password restriction on opening, assuaging one of the more legitimate concerns about the technology. Musitek offers helpful tips in making the most of your source material: Lyrics and chord symbols are a bit of a crapshoot.
Simpler music will fare better than more complex music. Generally speaking, the clearer and easier the music is to read, the better the output will be. If you’re familiar with the default output from these products already, you can expect similar results from Music-to-XML. Music-to-XML is only useful if you have a music notation program to work with, while the more full-featured programs like SmartScore X 2 Pro and PhotoScore Ultimate can be used as stand-alone products. You can’t actually open and view a file with Music-to-XML you can’t resolve errors, extract parts, delete items, change page size, transpose, print it, play it back or export audio. Unlike its big brother SmartScore X 2 Pro or SmartScore’s main competitor, Neuratron’s PhotoScore Ultimate, there is no music editing capability in Music-to-XML. It can optionally bypass the step of saving the MusicXML file to your hard drive and instead send it directly to Finale, Sibelius, or Dorico. Music-to-XML is, essentially, a “black box” that, like the schematic above, intakes PDFs (or TIFF image files) and outputs music notation files in the MusicXML interchange format. What is SmartScore Music-to-XML, exactly, and how does it differ from what’s already available, or indeed, what was going to be included in Finale? Music-to-XML is a converter box
PDFTOMUSIC PRO ONE STAFF AT A TIME PC
The Mac version can be purchased from Apple’s App Store and the PC version can be purchased from Microsoft’s Windows App Store. Without burying the lede further, Musitek, the maker of that technology, has released it as a separate $100 product called SmartScore Music-to-XML that will do the exact same thing as what was planned for inclusion in Finale: take a PDF containing scanned music and convert for use in music notation software. Nevertheless, the music recognition technology which had been available all along remained so. This misguided opinion gained a following on social media, and in light of the brouhaha MakeMusic decided to pull the feature prior to release of Finale 25.
Surprisingly, though, a row ensued, with one prominent composer predicting lawsuits over the feature along with “the collapse of music sales” and declaiming “no upside” to it. There was no real breakthrough in terms of music recognition capability, for which the technology had been available and modestly improving for a couple of decades already.
The inclusion of this planned feature was a relatively modest evolution in that it obviated the need for separate music scanning software (priced at around $300) to read these files, save them, and then open them in your music notation software of choice. Mark Adler, MakeMusic’s notation product manager, snapped a photo of a piece of music with a mobile scanning app, sent the file to his computer, and demonstrated opening the file directly with Finale. Last spring, you may recall that MakeMusic announced that they were going to include PDF importing directly into Finale 25.
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