The full version of Photoscore adds some important scanning features lacking in the lite version: support for multiple voices, articulations, all key signatures and text.
It does a very good job of picking up multiple voices and articulations. Using my house styles, however, Sibelius would put the crescendos that PhotoScore scanned beneath the staff right into the middle of the staff! It wasn’t a problem dragging it down to where it belongs, and it is nice to see a program that scans more than just notes.
Text scanning was not very good at all. It picked up cresc, decresc and rit quite well, but most other tempo markings or even titles were very poorly recognized. Fortunately these are very easy to edit. It does make you wonder, however, why it couldn’t be more accurate in this regard.
Overall, I found the full version to be more accurate in recognizing notes that the lite version. The results ranged from unbelievably good to unbelievably poor, depending on the score. Some brass quintets I scanned were perfect – every note, rhythm and articulation was identified. The original score was clean and well spaced. I was equally surprised with some solo trumpet literature from a Franco Colombo publication in 1953. The music was very crowded and the note heads were quite thick – not pleasant to read at all. However, PhotoScore did a fine job reading it and only made two or three errors on the entire page, apart from the text errors.
PhotoScore also surprised me with it’s ability to pick up complex meters, frequent time changes and an abundance of articulations. However, it occasionally lapsed and missed the first two or three bars of the last system on the page. Rescanning sometimes helped, although in most cases re-reading the music was more useful.
Where PhotoScore disappointed me was it’s inconsistency. There were a couple of scores that were horribly inaccurate, with many missing notes and missing accidentals. These were generally scores with small staves, so scanning the music at 120% may have helped. It was surprising, however, to see how poorly it could recognize what seemed to me to be fairly simple music.
All in all, however, PhotoScore does a fine job of scanning music. You can’t depend on it to work for every score, however, and there will still be cases where you are better off entering the music yourself with the keyboard! They still have a way to go before they have perfected music OCR.
Notation & Scoring
