sibelius/photoscore question

badjazz

ok, somebody on this board seems to know something about nearly everything musically related, so I thought I'd ask. I have been scanning in old sheet music into sibelius (notation software) using the photoscore lite program that was included. A lot of the stuff gets screwy, and I have to fix it manually. I was wondering if anybody out there has tried the fancy version of the software, photoscore professional. If so, would you recommend it as an upgrade to the lite version? It costs like $200, so I don't want to get it if it isn't going to make a difference. Some of the main problems I'm having is that the lite version doesn't recognize triplets, so all of the measures with triplets look like they have more notes than the time signature allows, which generally puts things out of wack.

TenorClef

I tried the Photo score lite version was not impressed. I like the Sibelius software better but you have to manually input all the data your self which can be time consuming. I would imagine the basic concept of the Lite version contains the essence of the bigger version. Its a great idea that just requires more work.

Bob Holo

Speaking as a former product manager in a tech company... I would say that the base optical character/symbol recognition engine is likely the same across the two programs. "Lite" versions are generally de-featured, but run off the same base code (which they probably didn't even write... this sort of functionality is often licensed from 3rd party specialists). Most of the team's time is spent integrating the licensed code with their user interface and testing it on various platforms to make sure it is stable. Development and maintenance of the actual recognition technology would likely be infeasible from an economic standpoint. So, from an "initial recognition accuracy" standpoint, the two are likely very similar if not identical. However, the "pro" version of the software may include wizards that would make finding/fixing a mis-recognized character easier... and that might be valuable to you.

I'll give you a real world analogy... most of the speech recognition software out there actually runs on base software written by two companies who you've probably never heard of - but they just happen to be really darned good at writing and maintaining speech recognition code because it's all they do. Why do most companies license from them? Well... because, http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 7782777472

badjazz

Thanks for the input, it makes sense that they would likely just use the same recognition engine. As far as additional wizards to help fix, that isn't too much of a big deal because once I export the file from photoscore to sibelius, sibelius makes it pretty easy to modify stuff. It takes a while, but it is still way faster than inputting it into sibelius manually. BTW, sibelius is a really cool program for anybody into transcribing, arranging, or composing. I've been working with it to scan in some scores I have and then rearrange them for the instrumentation in the band I'm playing with. It's really a huge time/accuracy help, especially when I'm dealing with transcribing instruments. Now if I could just get the band members to follow my arrangements.

Funny video about the voice recognition software. It was eerily similar to the time I tried to use MS voice recognition software that was included with my laptop. Glad it is not just me.