Most users wont be wont be as hindered by the programs lyrical limitations as I was in this scenario.I Primarily bought it to publish a few songs that I am referencing in a forthcoming article about wedding music from the time of the Renaissance.I didnt want to run into any copyright infringements for reproducing 500 year old music from relatively modern sources and thought that I should look into some music OCR programs to simplify the process of reformatting and arranging them.
While testing the demo versions I used the same cleanly scanned sheet of five line choral music from a book published in 1948. I found that SmartScore recognized the notes, articulations and dotted rhythms much more accurately than PhotoScore. However, I noticed that PhotoScore did a better job of recognizing lyrics than SmartScore. Who cares about the lyrics, I thought, I need this to recognize music not text anyway, right. ![]() ![]() Now, not surprisingly, all of the music OCR programs seemed to have problems with dotted rhythms and staccato articulations, but SmartScore seemed to handle it best. I did like the way PhotoScore laid the original music directly behind the vectorized version better than PhotoScores method of comparison, but since it wasnt as accurate I decided it would still be more labor intensive in the long run to use PhotoScore. As I expected SmartScore Pro X did a great job recognizing the music, but the lyrics were a complete mess. This ended up being a bit more of a problem than I expected because of the way that the lyrics are tied together with their corresponding notes. You have to select the notes with the Lyric tool and then click into the text below the staff to edit them. It actually ended up taking me longer to clean-up the unrecognized lyrics than it did the music itself. However, this tedious task actually helps you ensuring that the lyrics line up with their corresponding notes during reformatting. I ended up taking out most of the dynamics completely for the time being. When I reformatted the systems to fit on an 8.511 sheet of paper to be aesthetically pleasing, the dynamic symbols like fortissimos and pianos would stay in the same place they were originally placed; and in some cases move completely off the side of the page. It was the second last page of the piece and I didnt notice it until I was just about finished reformatting everything to fit on a letter sized paper. I found it very difficult to merge the two additional missing systems from one recognized file to the other. To get the copy and paste to work I needed to format the new scan to the exact number of measures per system and same part names as the edited file. Even after I did manage to paste the extra page into my main file it caused a lot of problems with text styles. Even before merging the two documents together, the text styles kept defaulting to the original fonts after the file was closed and re-opened. The fact that the fonts kept defaulting to incorrect styles was particularly annoying in my example because Renaissance Madrigals tend to be similar to canons. Therefore, my example held 5 completely separate lines of lyrics per system.
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