smartscore lite scanning into finale version 25

You can’t actually open and view a file with Music-to-XML you can’t resolve errors, extract parts, delete items, change page size, transpose, print it, play it back or export audio.

Unlike its big brother SmartScore X 2 Pro or SmartScore’s main competitor, Neuratron’s PhotoScore Ultimate, there is no music editing capability in Music-to-XML.

It can optionally bypass the step of saving the MusicXML file to your hard drive and instead send it directly to Finale, Sibelius, or Dorico. Music-to-XML is, essentially, a “black box” that, like the schematic above, intakes PDFs (or TIFF image files) and outputs music notation files in the MusicXML interchange format. What is SmartScore Music-to-XML, exactly, and how does it differ from what’s already available, or indeed, what was going to be included in Finale? Music-to-XML is a converter box

The Mac version can be purchased from Apple’s App Store and the PC version can be purchased from Microsoft’s Windows App Store. Without burying the lede further, Musitek, the maker of that technology, has released it as a separate $100 product called SmartScore Music-to-XML that will do the exact same thing as what was planned for inclusion in Finale: take a PDF containing scanned music and convert for use in music notation software. Nevertheless, the music recognition technology which had been available all along remained so. This misguided opinion gained a following on social media, and in light of the brouhaha MakeMusic decided to pull the feature prior to release of Finale 25. Surprisingly, though, a row ensued, with one prominent composer predicting lawsuits over the feature along with “the collapse of music sales” and declaiming “no upside” to it. There was no real breakthrough in terms of music recognition capability, for which the technology had been available and modestly improving for a couple of decades already. The inclusion of this planned feature was a relatively modest evolution in that it obviated the need for separate music scanning software (priced at around $300) to read these files, save them, and then open them in your music notation software of choice. Mark Adler, MakeMusic’s notation product manager, snapped a photo of a piece of music with a mobile scanning app, sent the file to his computer, and demonstrated opening the file directly with Finale. Last spring, you may recall that MakeMusic announced that they were going to include PDF importing directly into Finale 25.

Smartscore lite scanning into finale version 25