Academic Sibelius Photoscore MIDI

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

Sibelius 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.

Both Sibelius Photoscore MIDI and PhotoScore Professional can read most musical markings, including:

• Notes & chords (including tail direction, beams & flags), rests
• Accidentals, articulation marks
• Tuplets/triplets (v2 only)
• Clefs, key signatures, time signatures
• 5-line staves (normal and small), barlines
• The format of the page, including the page size, staff size, margins, and where systems end
• Slurs, ties and hairpins
• Text including lyrics, dynamics, guitar chords (v2 only), fingerings (v2 only), instrument names, tempo and technique markings

Once the music has been PhotoScored, it can be opened within other music editing software 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

All versions of PhotoScore save MIDI files* which can be used by virtually all music editing packages.

Please note that because 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.

What do people use PhotoScore for?

• Accompaniment and guidance when practicing instruments
• Creating MIDI files to put on web pages for others to hear
• Scanning music for use in sequencers or other editing programs; for re-arranging, transposing (e.g. to bring a vocal part into range), extracting parts and printing
• Just for fun! With PhotoScore you can scan in your favorite song, have it played back to you, change the instruments and so on - use your imagination!

System Requirements

PC

An IBM compatible 486 or higher PC with at least 64Mb RAM (computer memory), but 96Mb RAM is recommended and even more if using Windows 2000 or XP. If your computer has less than 64Mb RAM, contact your supplier for a memory upgrade. More than 96Mb may be desirable if you need to scan small staves a lot, or for scanning photos and graphics. 
 
Your computer should also have a reasonable amount of free hard disk space - at least 40Mb and preferably rather more. 
 
(Optional) A scanner (probably connected to your computer via a SCSI card, Printer port or USB port), and installed TWAIN driver software.

MAC

An Apple Macintosh PowerPC with Mac OS 8.6 or higher. It should have at least 64Mb RAM (computer memory), but 96Mb RAM is recommended. If your computer has less than 64Mb RAM, contact your supplier for a memory upgrade. More than 96Mb may be desirable if you need to scan small staves a lot, or for scanning photos and graphics. 
 
Your computer should also have a reasonable amount of free hard disk space - at least 40Mb and preferably rather more. 
 
(Optional) A scanner (probably connected to your computer via a SCSI card, Printer port or USB port), and installed TWAIN driver software.