Hello,

I'd like to offer my own review of a computer program designed for those who might wish to automatically get hard-copy sheet music into the Band-In-A-Box or RealBand programs. In my opinion the product I'm about to describe works extremely well, is easy to install and use (I'm using MS-Windows 7, 64-bit), and because of it's incredible accuracy, rarely requires any user intervention. I felt it was well worth the selling price (mine was $49.99), as it consistently saves me many hours of typing hard-copy sheet music into Band-In-A-Box.

Disclaimer: There may be other computer software packages available that could perform the same function. This particular program was the one that I ended up buying and the one I currently use. As of February 2010 when I purchased the software, there did not appear to me to be ANY product available that could perform this same function (also note that I wanted a standalone program that was not bundled with some other software package). I have used the software for about four months (at about twice a month). I freely offer up this information because I thought that BIAB users might like to know more about it -- from a BIAB user's perspective (I also suggested that that the BIAB developers build in this function to scan hard-copy sheet music into BIAB). While it certainly wasn't my intent to write a commercial for this software title, I did intend to provide the reader with a thorough and unbiased evaluation and secondly, as of this writing I do not know about other programs or options that may be available that might perform the same function. So, as of this writing I had nothing else to compare it to.

The Software: I found a program called SmartScore by Musitek . I purchased the MIDI version of the program and the best price I've found for it was at amazon.com. As of the date of my post it was available for $42.42 at Amazon.com.

What it's used for: Using any scanner and the SmartScore program, you simply scan your hard-copy score (note also that it allows for scanning an unlimited number of pages into a project). You then save your work (which the program can be set to do automatically) to a MIDI, XML or NIF file. You can then load BIAB or RB and use the MIDI file.

Review: Here's a short list of some of the features that I've found particularly useful as a BIAB / RB user. There are likely more features that each of you may like, but I only use it with the BIAB software.

1. The program is incredibly fast and it is very accurate. It works with most scanner brands and models.

2. It includes a built-in MIDI notation editor. If SmartScan finds something that it thinks could potentially be interpreted differently, it highlights these places and (using a split-screen of the original scan and the resulting MIDI), allows you to quickly identify the information in question (in my own use I found that it rarely interrupts processing with user questions -- it's normally quite correct in it's assessment without any user intervention).

3. It includes a built-in MIDI player to hear your score immediately. It also has a Jukebox feature to play multiple songs automatically. It provides support for your VST plug-ins.

4. It can scan a very large number of staves per score (I myself that I find lots of director-type scores), and it can optionally break each of these out into single-instrument MIDI's. Theoretically, if I didn't want to work with the MIDI file in BIAB, I could use SmartScore to quickly print up separate sheets for each of my band members.

5. It has the ability to combine multiple parts into a single conductor's score (a nice feature).

6. It has several special features just for guitar players (too many to list).

7. It has a Karaoke feature (the kids enjoy this -- since they can find free sheet music online for virtually any tune they've ever heard on the radio and then just download the sheet and fire up SmartScore )! This program also allows you to import files directly without printing the score and then scanning it back in. Thus, it will convert different file types to MIDI.

8. Automatically reformat your scores according to your own set of "standards" or set up special templates to use (comes with some too).

9. Works with Finale software.

10. It can save the result in MIDI, WAV or XML file formats. It can import TIF, TIFF, MIDI, XML, BMP, PDF and NIF) files.

I hope this helps someone. It's worked quite well for me and spending the rest of your life typing is a terrible thing to waste!

Last edited by ikeinblackriver; 05/25/10 11:01 PM.
Ike