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I’m looking for a free APP or software to convert PDF Music to a MIDI file or MusicXML?
Not necessarily for BIAB, but a general way of converting those types of files.
There are many sites that offer FREE conversion for 7 days and then they want into your 🏧.
Anyone that can help me out here?
I’m looking to convert 1 song to a Piano part.
Thanks,
Trax
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MuseScore offers an experimental converter using audiveris, but you have to log on and I haven't had much success with it myself. I don't know off-hand if one needs a MuseScore subscription for it. I usually just enter the scores manually. https://musescore.com/importhttps://github.com/Audiveris/audiveris
Jazz relative beginner, starting at a much older age than was helpful.
AVL:MXE Linux; Windows 11
BIAB2025 Audiophile, a bunch of other software.
Kawai MP6, Ui24R, Focusrite Saffire Pro40 and Scarletts
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I am only aware of payed versions and they are quite expensive. I use PDFtoMysic by Myriad Software. There are also a PRO version. The basic version can export to MIDI and the PRO version can export to both MusicXML and MIDI. Note that it only works for music that have been written to PDF by a Music score editor (i.e. not scanned PDFs). If you only have one song to export from PDF to MusicXML or MIDI maybe you can try their trail versions. Just download the software and it is in a trail version. The trial version allows you to export one page only at the time from the PDF (but as far as I can see when I testing it it is possible to go through the pages and export them one by one, I just tested with a few pages). If it works the result will be a series of Music XML pages (if using the PRO trial) building up to the complete score. So some editing to merge it all together will be necessary in the end. PDFtoMusic linkI am not aware of any software that can convert scanned versions of PDF music scores. The few versions I have tested in the past just ended up with rubbish results just takes up lot of time trying or editing.
BIAB 2026, Studio Pro 8, Song Master Pro, Win11 Home. i7-9700K CPU, 32GB, ESI MAYA44eX, ZOOM UAC-2, Guitar Pro 8, Transcribe, (EZKeys2, EZD3, SD3, EZBass, EZMix3)
Amateur: fiddle, guitar, vocal, beginner on bass.
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Free? No. I’ve tried them all. This is what I use at least once every week: ScanScore Pro 3 https://scan-score.com/en/?gad_source=1Price starts at $9 with a free trial. You have choices of levels and pay more to have more staves. PDF to Music works great when it works, but it’s more expensive and most of the time it aborts and claims the score is not a published score. ScanScore Pro 3 can scan from your scanner or read an PDF. It always gives me something decent to start with, although none of these programs will read everything perfectly. You have a choice of correcting scan errors in the program, or exporting with the errors that you fix in your software of choice. The license renews each year but not automatically, so you have an opportunity to use it with a reasonably low price commitment.
BIAB 2025 Win Audiophile. Software: Studio One 7 Pro, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Slate VSX, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
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PDF to Music is overpriced crapware. It cannot scan annd only import font info contained in a pdf (if it knows the fonts). It is way behind the times as it cannot handle SMuFL fonts. If the PDF is a picture only, the app is useless. Published sheet music is normally graphic only and contains no font information. SmartScore by Musitek scans images and is good but rarely perfect. The MIDI only version of SmartScore is $49 while the Pro is $399. Finale and Dorico owners get a 50% discount on some versions including Pro. A major update was released a couple weeks ago, probably to compete with ScanScore — no charge to owners of the current versions of SmartScore64, myself included. Musitek also makes an iOS/Android app, Music-to-XML for $99 available from the same page.There’s no demo but you can send them a page to test. You can convert to MIDI by opening in a notation app—where you will have to do some editing most likely—and export to MIDI from there. It’s a “black box” app in that you cannot edit in the app, only the output once exported. This was supposed to be bundled with Finale 25 and was announced but was pulled at the last minute over copyright concerns. ScanScore is also a scanning app that works over iOS/Android or your scanner. There are three levels — subscription only. I have had versions of SmartScore for decades but I rarely import music anymore. If I did, I’d A/B SmartScore vs ScanScore and go with te one I liked best.
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It sounds good. I was not aware of ScanScore or SmartScore
I'm rarely converting PDF music so much nowadays only occational (I might need it once a year or so), so I am not so updated.
I might check them out but I would prefere to own the software as a lifetime licence.
BIAB 2026, Studio Pro 8, Song Master Pro, Win11 Home. i7-9700K CPU, 32GB, ESI MAYA44eX, ZOOM UAC-2, Guitar Pro 8, Transcribe, (EZKeys2, EZD3, SD3, EZBass, EZMix3)
Amateur: fiddle, guitar, vocal, beginner on bass.
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PDF to Music is overpriced crapware. That's rather harsh. Converting music PDFs to MIDI or MusicXML is far more complex than doing the same for ordinary text. The fact that it's complex and that there are fewer users of it is why it's less developed and why it's costly. If I'd spent three or four years developing and honing such a software I think I'd be pretty annoyed by that. Fortunately for me, I felt it was too complex and has too small a market to make a worthwhile business, so I never went near it. This is one area where AI might eventually make a decent improvement.
Jazz relative beginner, starting at a much older age than was helpful.
AVL:MXE Linux; Windows 11
BIAB2025 Audiophile, a bunch of other software.
Kawai MP6, Ui24R, Focusrite Saffire Pro40 and Scarletts
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As I mentioned, PDF to Music gives the best result if it works at all, which it usually doesn’t. I prefer ScanScore to SmartScore but that’s up to you to choose. At least they will do something with any music you feed them. The decision you always have to make when doing this is whether correcting the program’s results is easier than you keying the score in manually.
BIAB 2025 Win Audiophile. Software: Studio One 7 Pro, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Slate VSX, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
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Thanks for great information in your post. I understand why people use “free” yada yada just for the clickbait and THEN they hit you with “try it for free for 7 days.” lol
Trax
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Trax, is the PDF an original song? If not you may be able to find a MIDI version of the song.
Love is grand.
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No, it’s a song by CCM Artist Clay Crosse. I have the sheet music in a song book. I could purchase a professionally made midi, but I was checking out some of my iPhone 14 new features and came across an app called PlayScore which was supposed to convert PDF to MIDI.
I just wanted the notes converted. Then I was going to run it through BIAB to make my own version with RealTracks etc.
Trax
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No, it’s a song by CCM Artist Clay Crosse. I have the sheet music in a song book. I could purchase a professionally made midi, but I was checking out some of my iPhone 14 new features and came across an app called PlayScore which was supposed to convert PDF to MIDI.
I just wanted the notes converted. Then I was going to run it through BIAB to make my own version with RealTracks etc.
Trax As Mike Halloran alluded, there are several different possible formats of the data inside a PDF. PDF is a wrapper derived from Postscript and also includes various graphical formats in vector or pixel forms, so conversion from PDF to anything has a number of hurdles. Conversion from a wrapped typesetting source will be much less difficult than converting from a scanned document using some form of OCR. Personally I tend to look for songs I want to learn/use/adapt on places like musescore.com or one of the many MIDI or karaoke sites (e.g., karaoke-version.com), then adapt them locally to match what I want. I can usually find something fairly close that way, though as most of what I want is jazz, it may be easier. Otherwise it's do it myself.
Last edited by Gordon Scott; 09/12/24 01:48 AM. Reason: Added karaoke-version.com
Jazz relative beginner, starting at a much older age than was helpful.
AVL:MXE Linux; Windows 11
BIAB2025 Audiophile, a bunch of other software.
Kawai MP6, Ui24R, Focusrite Saffire Pro40 and Scarletts
.
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PDF to Music is overpriced crapware. That's rather harsh. ... Says you. I've tried it many times over the years and am fine with my opinion. It's $95 down the toilet as far as I am concerned. Absolute rubbish... unless all you want is export to MIDI and you are working with compatible files. SmartScore MIDI is a much better buy @ $49 because it converts scans. I have a much higher opinion (and a paid license for years) of PDFtoMusic Pro which has its uses. It does something that Finale and other notation apps cannot and that is open the PDFs of my Encore files with Text and Lyrics and export as MusicXML 3 (I think—may be xml 2.0 but it is good enough). The cost is $199 which is the same as SmartScore Pro 64 for me (Finale/Dorico owner 50% discount). SSP can scan graphics but for best results, you need to edit before export or edit in notation. PDF-MP cannot scan nor edit but it renders my Encore files accurately, a big time saver since I have hundreds and still work in Encore now and then on one of my old Macs. Encore's xml 1.1 (Win) or 1.3 (Mac) exports notes and some text only but no lyrics or expressions. The PDFs contain all of this info, of course, and PDF-MP can extract and export. The current version works over the latest macOS — ok, it looks like OS 8.1 or Win 3.1 but I don't care as long as it works. I’m looking for a free APP or software to convert PDF Music to a MIDI file or MusicXML?
… Both are available for evaluation. PDF to Music Pro download Interestingly, they are fully functional with the following restriction—it will only export the first page. If you have a compatible PDF file, you can save one page at a time using Print to PDF in Preview (Mac) or your PDF print engine of choice (Win), convert each page for free. Of course, there's still this: As I mentioned, PDF to Music gives the best result if it works at all, which it usually doesn’t... There's no workaround.
BIAB 2025 Audiophile Mac
24Core/60CoreGPU M2 MacStudioUltra/8TB/192GB Sequoia, M1 MBAir, 2012 MBP
Digital Performer11, LogicPro, Finale27/Dorico/Encore/SmartScorePro64/Notion6 /Overture5
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I should clarify that my comments were about PDF to Music Pro (the expensive one). I have never even tried the non-pro version.
BIAB 2025 Win Audiophile. Software: Studio One 7 Pro, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Slate VSX, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
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PDF to Music is overpriced crapware. That's rather harsh. ... Says you. I've tried it many times over the years and am fine with my opinion. It's $95 down the toilet as far as I am concerned. Absolute rubbish... unless all you want is export to MIDI and you are working with compatible files. SmartScore MIDI is a much better buy @ $49 because it converts scans. Oh, OK, I see, I misunderstood; Sorry. I took "PDF to Music" to be a concept, not a specific product. You hadn't put it in quotes or anything, so I didn't that you were criticising a specific product. I can't comment at all on the the specific product, I know nothing about it.
Jazz relative beginner, starting at a much older age than was helpful.
AVL:MXE Linux; Windows 11
BIAB2025 Audiophile, a bunch of other software.
Kawai MP6, Ui24R, Focusrite Saffire Pro40 and Scarletts
.
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I should clarify that my comments were about PDF to Music Pro (the expensive one). I have never even tried the non-pro version. I figured as much knowing that you are another Encore user like I. I did not want to assume, however. …
I took "PDF to Music" to be a concept, not a specific product. You hadn't put it in quotes or anything, so I didn't that you were criticising a specific product. No problem, Gordon. That's why I took the time to write a more complete comparison this morning. What I didn't mention is the raft of products pushed at Sibelius users including PhotoScore, PlayScore, SharpEye, NotateMe and lord knows what else. Not being a Sibelius user, none of the marketing for any of those has convinced me to download a demo. One never hears of them outside of Sibelius World. No, nowadays, it's ScanScore, SmartScore and PDFtoMusic Pro (with the caveat that it doesn't work with most scores one finds on the internet). Since the new Muse Group tool imports into MuseScore only, I have no use for it. Both are free but it's a fair bit of work. Speaking of which, PDFtoMusic Pro does read MuseScore pdf files one finds on musescore.com ... but those files can be downloaded as .musicxml, too so there's no point in the $200 app for that. MuseScore's current version, 4.4 does a decent job of exporting MIDI and .musicxml.
BIAB 2025 Audiophile Mac
24Core/60CoreGPU M2 MacStudioUltra/8TB/192GB Sequoia, M1 MBAir, 2012 MBP
Digital Performer11, LogicPro, Finale27/Dorico/Encore/SmartScorePro64/Notion6 /Overture5
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Among all these answers (that go way beyond what was asked) would be the contents of a good article for the Tips and Tricks Forum.
BIAB 2025 Win Audiophile. Software: Studio One 7 Pro, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Slate VSX, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
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