Hi There!
I need to find some software that can read and then play back music as a midi file that is printed on a PDF document. I understand Sibelius can do this, but it’s really expensive. Any suggestions? I need something in the next few days
Mike
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John Kennedy says
Photoscore will do it too, which you should be able to buy separately. In my experience though, software can never read it perfectly accurately, so I now just transcribe it all.
Bill Paisner says
Sibelius won’t do this. The software that does it is very complicated and typically fairly expensive. Examples are PhotoScore, SmartScore, and PDFtoMusicPro. I use PhotoScore and am currently investigating PDFtoMusicPro. None are perfect and you will need to go through a fix-up stage with any of them before generating a midi file.
Andrea Goodman says
Yes Sibelius reads pdf’s with photoscore lite (come with it) and even better with photoscore ultimate. It has had the ability to do this for over ten years. Please let me know if you find a better one, but that is the best. There are ways to get it cheaper- I don’t know where you are looking, but this is available:
1) Discounts for trade-ups from other software such as Finale-
2) Educational discounts
3) Buying older versions cheaply. Even Sibelius 4 can read photo core, and they are up to 8 now. I’ll bet you can get version six cheaply.
That’s my two cents, I use this all the time.
Andrea Goodman
sangerforum says
If you have an account on musescore.com, you can try to convert the pdf to MuseScore file format (uploading the pdf to musescore.com). Load the resulting file into MuseScore (freeware scorewriter), and export it as MIDI.
David M. Spitko says
Hi MIke. It is actually Photoscore that reads a pdf and converts it to music notation. One then transfers it into Sibelius for editing – although there is an editing function in Photoscore, but I have never used it. http://www.neuratron.com/photoscore.htm I has playback and output as MIDI. While rather accurate on simplier music and clean pdfs, with more complex music and/or noisy pdfs, there will need to be sometimes significant editing.
David Spitko