SmartScore X2 Pro Edition - scan your sheet music

As good as SmartScores recognition is, it is rarely perfect. Generally, you will need to do a bit of clean up. Still, no one has ever proved that its faster to enter notes one at a time rather than use SmartScore... we call that the John Henry test and the steam driver (we mean, SmartScore) wins ever time. - Page 35 of the quick reference guide.

I have been trying - fortunately - demo software, both for the SmartScore X2 Pro version, and the SmartScoreX2 Guitar Edition. In principle, all I want to do is take a perfect normal notation classical guitar score in PDF form, bring it into the software, recognize it (the program makes a TIF), and do nothing more than add tablature notation to it. The big version (Pro) crashes - just disappears from the computer screen - about 8 seconds after trying to do this. Thinking the Guitar Edition might be different, I tried it. It chugged away from 3-4 minutes before it was obvious that the program was not responding. Tried again, and in 8 seconds, just like the full Pro version, the program just crashed - disappeared from the screen, no error messages, nothing. Ive wasted about 3 hours on this stuff. I wrote their tech support an email yesterday asking for some, any, advice, and no answer. This is as basic as it gets, it seems to me. It doesnt work at even the simplest level.

After the piano version wiped out my hard drive and took hours to recover, I installed on a test system (windows7). It crashes repeatedly until you figure out exactly the correct scanning resolution. The scanning interface is pitiful, and after scanning 7 pages of SATB double staff music, painfully slowly, it then announced that it couldnt handle double staffs.

This is a great program! But, if you expect it to automatically do everything for you, there is no program that will, nor any other that even comes close. This one comes closest to any I have seen. I use it for personal performance music as well as for reading interpreting and arranging scores for church and community choir. It is best used by pre-editing your score tif files on a good photo editor. Pay very careful attention to removing dynamics marks, then re-inserting them after conversion. You must be prepared to edit your scans both before and after conversion. There are some twists and quirks that I absolutely hate. There are far more features that I absolutely LOVE. I would recommend this program for any serious musician, choir director or performer. If you dont like it, it will be because you do not really understand music editing and electronic assistants. (Or assistance, either one.)

After recognition, sometimes the results werent good. Then I learned it was because I scanned at too low a resolution.

Ive used SmartScore for years, and recently upgraded to X2. Ive cursed at the product a few times, but with its recognition capabilities its saved me a huge amount of time. There doesnt seem to be anything like it in the price range. The key is to accept that recognition of scores is much more complex than OCR for text, recognition is rarely perfect, and the errors that occur are usually fixed easily once the user gets past the learning curve (esp. Keyboard shortcuts). The scoring, playback and import/export features are also very good. I own Finale but often still do scoring in SS since its scoring compares favorably. SS doesnt do well with even good hand-done notation, maybe well see that in the future. But it does well with published notation, and using the image editor you can clean up bad scans to improve recognition.

I downloaded the free the demo first and try it. I tried every which way. Uploaded clear PDF files(not scans) . Simply music. Tried drums and bass. Nope! Contacted customer service. They finally just ignored me as it seems their only answer would be sorry we sell software that doesnt work Run and Save your money. This is second software of this type I have tired to no avail. A few more companies make similar. Onto the next one to try.

Ive owned SmartScore Pro for the last several versions. I dont know that all the upgrades really add any functionality that I need. That being said, this program does almost everything that I need it to do. Unlike some of the other reviewers, I don’t find that the program crashes all the time. Yes, once in a while it will crash, and it will ALWAYS crash after you save a file in .WAV format. Just make sure you saved the native file before you create WAV files.