The fact that the online “manual” page contains so few paragraphs is a good indication not only of the simplicity of the application but also of how well it has been designed. To capture a page (with the iPhone’s inbuilt camera – and 5 or 6 is recommended – at least an 8 Megapixel camera), tap Capture, frame the page of the score properly, tap a camera icon when Done, the screen with the digitized segment is displayed for you to play back though earphones or speaker. With that relatively inexpensive Première version you can export, send, share digitized files, and otherwise reproduce them for manipulable playback on your desktop using either Musitek’s SmartScore free Player (the more fully-featured X 2 series when not discounted costs $399) or most of the mainstream notation software: Sibelius, Finale and Garageband. You’d be forgiven – even these days – for having too much faith in a system that claimed to allow you to use a mobile device to capture a sheet of notes on the stave and – within seconds – hear on your iPhone what you just captured there and (with the in-app purchased Première version, $9.99) export the digitized version to use elsewhere.īut NoteReader does just that.
REVIEW OF MUSITEK SMARTSCORE LITE SCANNING INTO FINALE VERSION 25 SOFTWARE
Their SmartScore NoteReader software for iOS (also available on Android) turns the image(s) captured by the iPhone’s camera into playable musical notes. Although it’s come a long way from the unreliable and inaccurate offerings of the 1980s (when it first became available for personal computers) if it doesn’t present you with a usable digital representation of your (scanned) hard copy which is also 99% accurate, it really has little more than curiosity value.Ĭalifornia-based specialists, Musitek, have set a higher challenge. Optical Character Reading (OCR) software is tricky.