From music sheet to MIDI (fourth round)

Time for SmartScore:

the Joropó piece, which comes from a PDF file generated with a music notation software (oh, well, if you look at the original score, you will see that this is far from perfect... not so Smart, after all!):

Given the previous performance, I couldn't expect too much for the old scanned document at http://www2.kb.dk/elib/noder/rischel/RiBS0848.pdf, but for completeness sake here it goes (although is almost useless):

And what about the scanned copy of one of my music books? Well, it gets confused with some of the bars, and it certainly would require some manual tweaking.

As per PhotoScore, MIDI files cannot be exported in the demo version, so I cannot test how well the music would be encoded.

So far, from the different softwares that I have tried, I think the ones that I would to try a bit better are SharpEye and PhotoScore

From music sheet to MIDI (third round)

Today is the time to try another piece of software: PhotoScore Ultimate 6

As with the others, we start with an easy one, the Joropó piece, which comes from a PDF file generated with a music notation software. And PhotoScore Ultimate 6 gets this:

A perfect performance. It is a pity that I could not save it to a MIDI file to try to load it with Rosegarden, since this was the Demo version, and that feature is not present.

The old scanned document at http://www2.kb.dk/elib/noder/rischel/RiBS0848.pdf does not get recognized very well with this program either:

And for my scanned copy of my book, PhotoScore does a quite decent job, although not better than SharpEye:

 It is a pity that the demo version cannot export to MIDI, because it would be nice to be able to compare PhotoScore's generated MIDI to that generated by SharpEye.

From music sheet to MIDI (second round)

Yesterday I tried PDFtoMusic Pro and Audiveris for getting MIDI files out of music sheets. Today I'm trying another software, which looks much more promising: SharpEye.

So, let's start with the easy one, the Joropó piece, which comes from a PDF file generated with a music notation software. SharpEye gets this:

Not a single mistake for the first seven bars, for all the guitars. Not bad at all. And the generated MIDI file can be loaded into Rosegarden without any trouble.

How does SharpEye cope with the old scanned document at http://www2.kb.dk/elib/noder/rischel/RiBS0848.pdf? Well, the side-by-side view of the original document and the music recognized shows that there is still plenty of room for improvement, although it does work much better than Audiveris.

But it is true that the quality of the original is a bit poor, so let's be a bit nicer with the poor silicon brain, and let's compare Audiveris and SharpEye with a nicely scanned piece (I scan a random piece in one of my books at 600 dpi, though put it back to 300 dpi when transforming it to JPG (for Audiveris) and TIFF (for SharpEye)), and the first 9 bars of the scanned document look like:

What Audiveris gets is this:

You can see that many of the notes are correct, but this would definitely require some time to tidy it up. Worse is the fact that the MIDI created out of this seems to be broken, and when trying to load it in Rosegarden it simply refuses to do it, showing the message: "Attempt to read past MIDI file end"

SharpEye does a much better job:

For the first nine bars, it looks like SharpEye has done an excellent job. Actually, for the whole piece (24 bars), I counted only three mistakes, which is very good, but we shouldn't get too carried away... When the created MIDI file is imported into Rosegarden, the first nine bars look like this:

A lot of mistakes now... More or less OK to recognize the piece, but given the quality inside SharpEye, one would like to get a better MIDI file...

The quest for the perfect sheet-to-MIDI tool is still on!

From music sheet to MIDI (originally from PDFs to MIDI)

There is a LOT of music out there... thousands and thousands of pieces, and not much time to practice all of them, so it would be very nice to be able to get a PDF file, convert it to MIDI and quickly have an idea of how it is supposed to be, and then perhaps use that MIDI file in order to practice. So I have been trying two different software tools to do it. The first one is PDFtoMusic Pro, which is not available for Linux and is not free, and the other one  Audiveris, which is Open Source Software and will happily work in Linux.

In order to test each software, I start with the piece Joropó (for four guitars), which can be downloaded from http://www.forrestguitarensembles.co.uk/quartets.html

PDFtoMusic Pro

I don't have Windows, but I installed this in my Ubuntu 10.04 machine with Wine 1.1.42, and it runs without any (apparent) trouble.

I had no trouble at all to load the file, and to play directly inside it, without exporting it to MIDI, but actually I'm more interested in being able to export it to a MIDI file, so that later I can tweak it from inside Rosegarden or similar.

Exporting the file (or only selected pages) to MIDI is trivial, and when loaded in Rosegarden, there is no problem with playback. If we want to edit the file with the Notation Editor in Rosegarden, the result is pretty good, as can be seen from the first measures:

In order to get the same notation as the original score, we would have to tweak some of the sharps and turn them into flats, connect some notes with ligados, and change the clef of the fourth guitar, but those are quite small things.

If we make changes to the score and then want to print the music, then the result is also quite good from within Rosegarden. In this case, I just changed the clef of the fourth guitar, and printed it from within Rosegarden (which uses Lilypond as the printing engine), and the result was quite acceptable:

So, with PDFs that are generated with a music notation software, PDFtoMusic Pro works very well, but it cannot handle scanned music. For instance, when trying to load the file http://www2.kb.dk/elib/noder/rischel/RiBS0848.pdf it will come up with the message:

Audiveris

Audiveris is different from PDFtoMusic Pro (besides being Open Source), in which it is actually an OMR software and it will scan any document for music, even if it hasn't been generated by a music notation software.

I start Audiveris like:

angelv@vaso:~/audiveris$ java -Xmx256M -jar dist/audiveris-3.4.jar


Audiveris can only handle one page at at time, so we decide to go for the first page, which I save as a PDF (with evince), but the result when loaded is just not there:

So, I convert it to png first, but then Audiveris cannot even load it:

angelv@vaso:~/temp$ convert -density 300 first_page.pdf first_page.png

[...]

omr.sheet.picture.PictureLoader.loadFile(PictureLoader.java:101) -- INFO: Loading image from /home/angelv/temp/first_page.png ...
 omr.sheet.picture.PictureLoader$Listener.imageComplete(PictureLoader.java:366) -- INFO: Image loading complete
 omr.step.SheetSteps$LoadTask.doit(SheetSteps.java:489) -- WARNING: Exception [java.lang.RuntimeException: Unsupported pixel size:16]
 omr.step.Step.doStepRange(Step.java:354) -- WARNING: Processing aborted [omr.step.StepException: java.lang.RuntimeException: Unsupported pixel size:16]


With JPG all looks much better:

convert -density 300 first_page.pdf first_page.jpg


And all is fine now:

So far we have only loaded the image. If we now want to perform the OMR step, we just go to the menu Step-Score, and we get the scanned music. If you look carefully below, there are some mistakes, but most of it is in the right place.

Now, in theory one can export this to MusicXML format and use something like Lilypond to create a printable score, but something is not working. If I export it to MusicXML (Score-Export), and then try to use musicxml2ly I get the following errors:


angelv@vaso:~/temp$ musicxml2ly first_page.xml
Reading MusicXML from first_page.xml ...
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/musicxml2ly", line 2969, in
    main()
  File "/usr/bin/musicxml2ly", line 2964, in main
    voices = convert (filename, options)
  File "/usr/bin/musicxml2ly", line 2874, in convert
    (voices, staff_info) = get_all_voices (parts)
  File "/usr/bin/musicxml2ly", line 2583, in get_all_voices
    all_voices = voices_in_part_in_parts (parts)
  File "/usr/bin/musicxml2ly", line 2573, in voices_in_part_in_parts
    voices = voices_in_part (p)
  File "/usr/bin/musicxml2ly", line 2560, in voices_in_part
    part.interpret ()
  File "/usr/share/lilypond/2.12.3/python/musicxml.py", line 676, in interpret
    int (attributes_dict.get ('divisions').get_text ()))
ValueError: invalid literal for int() with base 10: '4.0'
angelv@vaso:~/temp$



But I don't really care, as I'm interested in getting MIDI stuff (a basic PDF file can be created OK with Audiveris' own Score-PrintPDF option), though this will have the mistakes present in the scan, so it is not that useful...

But now let's go for the real thing: getting a MIDI file and playing it. Midi-Store MIDI will create a MIDI file, which then can be uploaded to a MIDI sequencer, in my case Rosegarden. Without any modification, the MIDI is more or less OK, though obviously the mistakes that were present in the scan are there, so a crucial part will be the ability to edit the score manually.

So, if we open the score editor in Rosegarden, we see that the notes are in there (the third guitar's first three bars don't show up when opening the editor in multitrack mode, but they are there if we open the editor just for the guitar's part), but they are all messed up (different clef for 3rd and 4th guitar, different key, different time signature,...).

How difficult is to change it back to a recognizable score?

Well, I did try to adjust it without looking at the Rosegarden documentation, but it was certainly not that trivial, so I decided to follow one of the Rosegarden tutorials to learn the basics, and then come back to this Joropó score, to try to adjust it properly. I followed the following Rosegarden tutorial, but even after reading that, it looks like doing all the modifications to get a score similar to the original one would be quite costly. A simpler task would be just to modify the MIDI file to "sound" like the original, but it is certainly going to take also some time to do it right.

So, if your music is in a PDF generated by a music notation software and you are happy to pay for it, then certainly PDFtoMusic Pro does a much better job. But how can Audiveris handle scanned music? As with PDFtoMusic Pro, I tried to scan the first page of http://www2.kb.dk/elib/noder/rischel/RiBS0848.pdf but I'm afraid that the result speaks for itself...:

So, I'm afraid that so far Audiveris is work in progress, but cannot really compete with PDFtoMusic Pro. I will continue my quest to see if I can find some way of making MIDI files out of scanned music sheets, but for the moment it looks like either they are PDF files produced with music notation software (in which case I can use PDFtoMusic Pro) or I will have to type them by hand...