Product Reviews

Optical character recognition is nothing new: applications have been turning scanned pages into live text for years. But PhotoScore Ultimate takes the process to a new level with its ability to read sheet music.

The procedure is straightforward: scan your music, either through your scanner's software or directly through PhotoScore, then load it into the application and press the Read button to set it to work. It takes less than a minute to read a page of music, and the results are displayed in standard musical notation.

Like any OCR software, PhotoScore isn't 100% accurate. But there's an ingenious editing method that allows scores to be corrected quickly and accurately. Click on any line in the music, and the original scan is displayed above it, making it easy to see which notes are out of place. Select a note, and press the up or down cursor keys to nudge it up or down.

If a note has been misread - for example, if a crotchet has to be replaced with a quaver, or if a rest or accidental needs to be added - a floating palette holds all the symbols required, and clicking on one will change the selected note. This palette is arranged in exactly the same way as the numeric keypad, and pressing a key here will activate the corresponding feature on the palette. It's an ingenious solution:

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you don't need to remember which keys correspond to which notes and accidentals, as they're all displayed on the palette, so making changes can be far quicker than reaching with the mouse.

PhotoScore will play the music for you, and any reasonably accomplished musician should be able to hear inaccuracies and so be able to locate and correct them with ease. The program will also correctly read song titles, chord symbols, lyrics and even guitar tabs. If it knows it's made a mistake - if the total values of all the notes in a bar don't add up to the value specified by the key signature - then it will flag the number of errors in each bar, again making it easy to locate and correct mistakes.

So why would you want to scan printed scores? Well, here's one good reason: PhotoScore can transpose a score after it's been interpreted, so a piece of music in one key can easily be moved to another and either printed or saved to a Midi file, QuickTime movie, AIFF or several other formats. Curiously, it fails to transpose chord symbols and guitar tabs - and multi-part music has to be transposed one part at a time.

Although minor inaccuracies are easy to correct, PhotoScore sometimes has trouble with multi-part scores. It will frequently see a vocal and treble line as being a two-part piano score, leaving the true bass line orphaned. It occasionally has difficulty reading treble and bass clef symbols.

As well as downloaded and printed music, PhotoScore also has a fair stab at reading handwritten scores. It does this with some difficulty, although following the guidelines does help to some degree. A 'major update' of handwritten score interpretation is planned for the near future.

PhotoScore isn't perfect, but its innovative and user-friendly approach makes it the best yet. We were able to achieve near-100% accuracy with PDF scores, less with scanned scores.