Sheet Music Scanner

Read through this all if you’re looking for an honest review :) I've been using this app for a little over a month now and it’s honestly almost perfect! I’m a 17 year old high schooler in the school band (I play percussion) and the marching season is coming up so I’ve been using this to help me learn how to play my songs and as a way to follow along as I play. The only major downside is how it can't read notations/etc. If there was away to manually input these factors I think that would be very useful. For example: since the app can't read if a note is if a sharp or flat you could just manually put it into the app so that it would know. Or something that I really wish was a thing would be changing the tempo throughout the music piece so when it would play it, it would automatically change it. Something similar to this is how it’s always one time signature. Almost all of my music changes tempo and time signatures throughout the peice so if I want to do just a full run through I really can’t. Also sometimes a tied note plays as two separate notes instead of one, so if there was a way to make a note muted, that would be helpful. What I’ve been doing is doing a screen recording of the song and just piecing it together in CapCut or another editing app which works fine. I’ve searched through many apps and this is so far the closest to what I was looking for and I think this is what I’ll be sticking with unless i find something else.

This app allows you to input music either by taking photos of it (easy, but the least reliable transcription method), using your own scanner (better), or downloading a PDF (best)…and, crucially, you can separate multiple staffs from each other, in order to—for instance—separate out the alto part. Note that if two parts are on one staff (soprano and alto, for instance), this app cannot separate them…but I can usually figure it out when there are only two parts to decide between. You can also play all the parts together, so you can get used to how your part blends with the others. You can change instruments for the playback, and a setting under the instrument panel allows you to adjust the pitch by semitones in case you need to transpose. You can also change the tempo as needed. There are extra features available if you upgrade, but for my purposes, this inexpensive pay-once app suits me fine! To improve transcription: if you’re taking a photo, try to do so with even lighting. If you’re scanning, try to use pages that have NOT had holes punched in them; problems will occur if, for instance, the hole excised a flat in the key signature. If you notice a lot of grayed-out notes (meaning the app couldn’t read them), ask your choir director if they have a clean PDF they can email you, and when you download it to your device, tell it to open the music in the Sheet Music Scanner app

I used the app with no instructions and took photos of a free Bach piano score. Using it was quite intuitive to add all 5 pages into one document. To my surprise it played the whole piece including repeats. The reason I bought this app was to transfer musicxml files to my desktop score writing programs. Using the export feature I found that I couldn’t email the file because the on-screen keypad became huge and the characters I pushed were coming out different. So I wasn’t able to email. Plan B. I have Onedrive on my phone, so I was able to send the translation to that without any issues. On the PC I imported the file into Guitar Pro and it came in perfectly putting the treble and bass clefs on separate tracks - perfect. It played the whole piece. Was everything perfect? No. The issue was that the music had been separated into different voices and there were also some missing rests. The app created 4 voices from the scan and some notes ended up on the wrong voice, so it means doing a little clean up. There were also a few dotted notes where the scanner had missed the dots. Sheet music is hard to interpret and the result is better than I had expected. I’m really pleased with the results and this has to be the best apps I have installed on my phone this year. Except for the weird email experience everything went smoothly. There are other features I need to explore, but I’m very happy with just the featured I used so far. Thank your effort to make this app!