Neuratron PhotoScore & NotateMe Ultimate 2020 £199

To scan and edit existing musical scores, the best option is a dedicated application (and one with a very long name)

Many DAWs include decent notation options allowing you to easily transcribe your MIDI creations into musical score. But what if your original music has been handwritten and you want to create multiple easy-to-read parts? Or perhaps you already have a printed score and want to convert it into MIDI data that you can edit or play? That’s where software developer Neuratron can help. Up for review is PhotoScore and NotateMe Ultimate 2020, the latest version of this long-established score scanning package. In fact, as the name implies it actually comprises two applications but these are conveniently combined in one workspace. PhotoScore is for importing and editing existing music scores while NotateMe (see boxout) is designed for handwriting scores from scratch.

PhotoScore uses optical music recognition (OMR) to analyse (read) both the musical and text aspects of musical scores and then allows you to edit them. You can scan directly into the software using a regular scanner or import PDFs, JPEGs, TIFFs and bitmap files. Once you’ve finished you can simply print the score or save it as MIDI, PDFs, Notation Interchange File Format (NIFF) or MusicXML. PhotoScore can also playback your analysed score using your computer’s own internal MIDI synth and export this playback as AIFF or WAV. This is a handy but basic feature and could certainly benefit from extended functionality.

Practice makes perfect