Sheet Music Scanner 4+

I am no expert at playing piano, but I love learning songs that I enjoy listening to. I have several songbooks that have multiple songs I don’t recognize by title or sheet music alone but would probably recognize if I heard them. Other songs I might recognize but not totally understand how that particular arrangement sounds. This app solves both issues, and speeds my learning time by giving me an easy way to hear what my fingers aspire to create. Just take a few pictures, let the app process it, and my sheet music plays out loud while tracking the place on the pages.

The one gripe I have is that not all imports are perfect. They are usually spot on, even catching codas by going back to the correct measure. However, sometimes an error occurs that splits the parts. For example, it will play only the treble clef for a line, then repeat the same measures again with only the the bass clef. I’ve fixed it by taking a new picture and reimporting, but that does waste a couple minutes. Overall, though, the accuracy is so high that it seems magical.

Fantastic app, highly recommend.

I’m a music teacher who is constantly coming into possession of old/obscure sheet music, many of which have no online records of their existence. The only way for me to hear how they’re supposed to sound is by tediously transcribing them into a music notation software. I was hoping that this app would be able to reduce that time and let me hear it straight away, and to say I was disappointed was an understatement.

Let’s get one thing out of the way. All the music I inputted was scanned beforehand, so legibility issues were not the problem. The problem is that the app doesn’t know how to read what it’s given. Timing was god-awful, notes were completely passed on, and it can’t distinguish between separate lines and voices to save its life. When I tried to put in a clarinet/piano duet, it sounded awful. Because there’s no way to tell the app that it was not looking at a piano piece with three staves, and therefore no way to transpose the clarinet properly. And even if it COULD distinguish, transposing only affects the whole piece, not the individual instruments, so don’t even try imputing an orchestra/concert band piece into here.

If you’re an instrumentalist who just wants to hear what your own part sounds like, maybe this app will work better for you. But even still, I’m not so sure if the price makes it worth it. Definitely not an app I would recommend. Guess that’s 5 dollars down the drain…and on a teacher’s salary no less!

This app really stands out to me compared to a lot of the other ones in the App Store. The fact I can use it to practice my part accurately and adjust the tempo or instrument as needed is a great feature, though I hope we will eventually be able to select which parts we want to play versus the one or all approach you currently get. Not a deal breaker by any means, just something for the future.

If there were two areas I think could use some improvement then first it’s the ability of the app to recognize multiple staves/staffs in a group. Sometimes it does this really well and I have no issues, and sometimes it will seemingly ignore the bottom stave in a group and treat it as an additional line instead of part of the entire ensemble. This is especially apparent in instances where a song might have just two staves in the ensemble and expand to three or four later on, though I have seen this in music that is consistent as well.

The only other feature would be for the app to recognize Coda’s, it I recognize that’s a complex ask you don’t see too often and so I won’t complain that much. Other than these two issues the app suites my needs at a very affordable price.