SmartScore X2 Pro Edition - scan your sheet music

this product is difficult to use, crashes often and the ocr is pretty weak. I spent hours and realized it is easier to record my own live piano performance than to work with the software

This is a great program! But, if you expect it to automatically do everything for you, there is no program that will, nor any other that even comes close. This one comes closest to any I have seen. I use it for personal performance music as well as for reading interpreting and arranging scores for church and community choir. It is best used by pre-editing your score tif files on a good photo editor. Pay very careful attention to removing dynamics marks, then re-inserting them after conversion. You must be prepared to edit your scans both before and after conversion. There are some twists and quirks that I absolutely hate. There are far more features that I absolutely LOVE. I would recommend this program for any serious musician, choir director or performer. If you don't like it, it will be because you do not really understand music editing and electronic assistants. (Or assistance, either one.)

"As good as SmartScore's recognition is, it is rarely perfect. Generally, you will need to do a bit of clean up. Still, no one has ever proved that it's faster to 'enter notes one at a time rather than use SmartScore'... we call that the 'John Henry' test and the steam driver (we mean, SmartScore) wins ever time." - Page 35 of the quick reference guide.I wish I had read this from the user manual before buying this product. SmartScore X2 is brilliant in concept, but for a $400 (!!!) price point one might expect something far more intuitive, clean, and reliable. Certainly useful to some extent, but I'm deeply discouraged that it did not live up to the expectations for performance the description held for it.

I've owned SmartScore Pro for the last several versions. I don't know that all the upgrades really add any functionality that I need. That being said, this program does almost everything that I need it to do. Unlike some of the other reviewers, I don’t find that the program crashes all the time. Yes, once in a while it will crash, and it will ALWAYS crash after you save a file in .WAV format. Just make sure you saved the native file before you create WAV files.The scanning function isn’t perfect. I read a review that this product didn’t support their scanner, but all you have to do is scan to a PDF file, and recognize that. SmartScore will convert to a .TIF format and recognize the score, so I don’t personally think that’s such a big deal. What modern scanner doesn’t scan to a PDF file? Or if you can only scan to TIF, SmartScore can natively recognize TIF files too.SmartScore doesn’t do a perfect scan of files, however, but I’d say it’s at least 95% accurate when I scan my scores. You do have to carefully compare the original to the scanned score, but they are in matching windows top and bottom, so this isn’t very difficult to do. Plus, SmartScore will highlight any bar in purple that it sees and not having the proper number of notes and rests, so that helps you locate errors. Believe me, scanning may not be perfect but it sure as heck beats doing it manually.I don’t use any other notation software, but SmartScore will open Music XML files. This feature isn’t fully developed, since I saved a file in XML, opened it in a trial of Forte, made a couple of changes, but after that SmartScore wouldn’t open it again. I wish that feature would work better.My two biggest complaints about the software:1. It doesn’t recognize or support ‘ghost notes,’ or those notes with an ‘X’ for the head of the note which indicate that there is a beat but not a note there. How hard could it be to add this functionality? I’ve asked for this feature for the last three or four versions.2. Also, when the software is playing your song, you can pause and resume from that point, and you can even select a sequence of notes from the page and play only those, but I don’t have any way to start playing from a specific point in the song. This is a problem when you’re working on a specific point in the song and you want to start from there.So, yes, the software is expensive. However, once you invest in the software, the upgrades aren’t that expensive, but still around 1/3 the cost of the original software. I’m not a composer, but a lyricist who works with other composers. There is a significant learning curve, but what major software package doesn’t have a steep learning curve? Think about the time you’ve spent learning Photoshop, or even Word or Excel, and you’ll see what I mean. Yes, you can jump right in and use the product, but you will be perusing the manual at first to figure out how to do the things you want to do.Still, I really like the product and think it’s worth the money. I wish that Musitek would be a little more responsive and add the features the users ask for, and it would be nice if the scanning function was a bit more accurate, but this tool is very useful. After using this software for many years, I tried evaluation versions of some other software like Forte and Sibelius strictly to find software that supports ghost notes, but I have to say the learning curve of moving from SmartScore to either of those products was simply too high for me to even consider switching to new software.

After the piano version wiped out my hard drive and took hours to recover, I installed on a test system (windows7). It crashes repeatedly until you figure out exactly the correct scanning resolution. The scanning interface is pitiful, and after scanning 7 pages of SATB double staff music, painfully slowly, it then announced that it couldn't handle double staffs.So I scanned using paperport, edited out the double staffs, saved at 400 dpi as a tif, and then it would recognize the music without crashing.So I called the company to see if there was a coupon code, since I had my doubts about paying the full retail pirce (I would use this for church). The guy said there was no coupon code for the piano version (real hard-seller there), and when i asked about a warranty he said there was no money-back guarantee. And when I told him the problems I had with the demo, and the time it cost me, he said he had never heard of such a thing! LOOK AT THE REVIEWS MUSICTEK, LOTS OF PEOPLE HAVE PROBLEMS WITH THIS CRAP!

After recognition, sometimes the results weren't good. Then I learned it was because I scanned at too low a resolution.I reached out to their support and got the answers I needed. Grey (not black and white) 300 dpi and save to PDF.Don't know about others who had issues, but I got mine sorted out. Now I'm lovin' it.

I downloaded the free the demo first and try it. I tried every which way. Uploaded clear PDF files(not scans) . Simply music. Tried drums and bass. Nope! Contacted customer service. They finally just ignored me as it seems their only answer would be "sorry we sell software that doesn't work" Run and Save your money. This is second software of this type I have tired to no avail. A few more companies make similar. Onto the next one to try.