Scanning into finale help needed

[labman]

What are you folks using now, when you have to scan an old score (or sheets) into Finale ? What are the options, and their plusses and minuses?

[MIDI Life Crisis]

I generally don't scan anything into Finale and find it easier and faster to just play the parts in. But if you want to scan, this thread might be helpful:

http://forum.makemusic.com/default.aspx?f=5&m=138795

As far as addressing your questions, we could discuss scanners, then programs, then resolutions, and formats, and what version(s) of Finale you're using? (I don't see it in your sig.)

Then there is the question of the size and quality of the original you're scanning and what you intend to accomplish as a final product in Finale with the scan or if you want to then port it over to a DAW for playback and arranging.

All factors in answering a seemingly simple question, but the short answer from my studio is: play it again, Sam; don't scan it. In the long run, that really is a mush faster and more reliable option provided you can read (even slowly) and know Finale. IOW, scanning is no shortcut, IMO. It's the long way home.

[labman]

Thanks MLC. I just got us a license for Finale 2014 yesterday, after many moons away from notation programs (we were on Mosaic way back when). And we just had a sorta bad time with one accompanist when hired out to play in a big bell choir score that client needed orchestration work done on.

So, ... I figured I would try to scan some stuff with perhaps smartscore X2 or photoscore or whatever. I just dont know the options. (We have a fairly nice canoscanner) And I certainly agree about the 'play it in' sam tip. But, for myself, my eyes are not doing well. I dont know how many times I have been to eye dr the past months trying to suss out whats up. Hence, finding quick accurate accompanists in our area. (Good luck with that one! )

I would also like to have someone (intern or such) get all our decades old scores from our vaults into DP somehow.

Most of our work does not involve others scores. But I thought with my coming month off in dec, I could get this stuff going. With all you guys help !!!

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Have you tried scanning and importing yet? When I've done the little I have done I scan outside of Finale and import w/o much problem. Then there's the damn editing.

[labman]

gotcha. I scan scores often to pdf's if thats what you mean. They are nice and clean. But just got finale2014, so I havent tried importing any.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Check the format you need and just try importing. SmartScan or whatever they call it was not necessary and the basic feature in F. will or should get you going pretty well.

But turning that into a competent "performance" probably means a SMF to DP and a bit of tweaking.

[mikehalloran]

Unfortunately, that old thread from 2006 is fairly useless. SmartScoreX, for example, barely worked in OS 10.5, not at all in 10.6 and later - which didn't stop them from selling it as I found out. A total waste of $200.

Now they want more money for an upgrade that, they promise, really does work - honest, no fooling this time. I could use it if it really works but my earlier experience leaves me sceptcal that it isn't more trouble than it's worth. YMMV, of course.

I haven't checked. Does Finale 2014 includes lite version of any current scanning product?

[labman]

Hiya Mike. Thanks for your input.

Yes, Finale 2014 includes Smartscore lite.

[mikehalloran]

Hmmm... I see that there's a SmartScoreX2 demo available, too. I'll play with it a bit this weekend - I have a Christmas project where it would save some time. I'll post my results.

I'm not ready to upgrade Finale yet. My immediate needs are still met by 2011.

[labman]

Well Mike. An interesting thing happened here yesterday. We have been finishing up a scoring job which required print outs of the score we wrote, for the live musicians. Quickscribe wasnt doing the job we needed as we needed staccatos etc. We imported our DP stuff into Finale2014 via both SMF's and also PDFs (TIFFS), so that they could be read by SmartScore lite. It certainly was working better, but there were still tons of cleanups to do. On friday eve, I called the SmartScore X2 folks, and discussed what we were seeing. They said that the newest X2 does some great things. So they got us our license in about 20 minutes and we installed it that eve.

Saturday am we ran same pdf and wmf thru X2 and wowzo. Amazing. The trpt score which had been missing bar lines on the earlier scans, along with many errant rhythms were 99% flawless. There was only 1 place where there were two 1/8th notes in sequence that had hanging stems that needed beamed together. That was all it needed for 212 bars. And most of the other inst parts the engineer ran thru it yesterday were similarly far far superior to the lite version.

I think it took him about 1 & 1/2 hours to both learn the basics of the program, and pop out all the individual horn scores along with a composite strg part , bass, chords, conductor score etc. We then just loaded them into finale in our other room, and were good to go.

I am sure there are more difficult scenarios that we might run into where the X2 may not fair as well, but we were quite astounded at the time it saved.

Havent tried it's scanning features yet, so cant comment on that. Just on how well it read the quickscribe PDFs.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Wowza indeed! Thanks for the report. Time to start looking at that version.

[mikehalloran]

I have interesting results of my own. It seems that all that work I did with Apple to get printing and scanning to work as advertised (they screwed a few things up in 10.6, made it worse in 10.7 and really, really screwed it up in 10.8 - all fixed in 10.8.2) paid off. It made SmartScore X work. Finally I could use it again. Unfortunately, it is just as useless (time consuming) in 10.9 as it was in 10.5 but I now had a benchmark.

So this morning, I downloaded and ran the SmartScore X2 Demo. Wowzo indeed! I didn't get the chance to Save and open in Finale - I have to upgrade first - but I will this evening. The improvement over SmartScoreX was leaps and bounds. In both cases, I opened the same scans of some Christmas music - made harder as the original is printed in green ink.

The Mac instructions are still wrong for 10.6 and later regarding TWAIN - just ignore those. But, since 10.8.2, scanning via Image Capture works properly even over wireless (you're all welcome). So scan to .tif greyscale (Black & White instead of Text on HP scanners). Go to Recognise Scans, Save As XML to Finale and you're good. As a notation program, you always want better than SmartScore.

[Nigel Keay]

As you've mentioned Mosaic and PDF, if you still have a working copy of Mosaic on an old computer it is possible to get them to PDF on OSX without a scanner. At the time it took me some time to figure out the procedure, but just thought I'd mention that.

[labman]

Good idea Nigel. Did you just select print, then save as PDF to disk?

[Nigel Keay]

It involved exporting as an .ps file (I don't think there was a save to pdf option). I then transferred the .ps file via a memory stick from one computer (OS 9.04) to the other (OSX). It took a while to find the settings that worked, but I have it written down somewhere and should be able to dig it out.