Klarinet Archive - Posting 000984.txt from 1999/11

From: "Karl Krelove" <kkrelove@-----.com>
Subj: RE: [kl] Scanning
Date: Thu, 25 Nov 1999 02:52:06 -0500

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jim O'Briant [mailto:jobriant@-----.com]
> I'd say that "a fair amount of touching up" is a vast understatement!
>
> I bought MidiScan and three or four upgrades, each of which was
> supposed to
> eliminate all the "touching up" that is required with this over-hyped
> program. But even after spending several hundred dollars, I can still
> enter a piece into ENCORE note by note with a mouse far faster than I can
> scan it in MidiScan, take all the necessary time to clean up the scanned
> file, convert it to midi and then import it into ENCORE.

I've found that this depends a lot on the quality of the original and of the
scan itself. I regularly scan clean originals with relatively little touch
up. Scanning poor photocopies, of course, aggravates the problem, as does
scanning older publications in which the engraving is more stylized.

>
> I now plan to buy Sibelius (if Santa's Elves haven't built me a
> copy), and
> it apparently has some sort of "import scanned files" capability.
> I don't
> know a lot of the details, but the Sibelius website at
> http://www.sibelius.com can probably provide lots of info.
>

Sibelius comes packaged with Neuratron Lite scanning software. It does about
as good a job of "recognizing" music notation from a scan as MidiScan or
SmartScore. It _is_ part of the Sibelius package, which is one of the
reasons why I originally bought Sibelius. Only hitch is if you need or want
to share files with others. Sibelius, like Finale/Allegro, uses its own
proprietary format. Finale's .MUS, unlike Sibelius's .SIB, has become
something of an industry standard. They don't read each other's files except
through the medium of .MID files, which carry no formatting information and
don't always even transmit rhythmic notation accurately. I like Sibelius,
but for material I may need to share with colleagues at school (work), I
need Finale + MidiScan. BTW, Finale 2000 reads MidiScan files (not
SmartScore) directly without converting to MIDI, preserving a good deal of
the page formatting, although still not the expression and text markings.

Karl Krelove

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