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Musitek SmartScore

Musitek SmartScore is software for PC or Mac that allows you to convert printed sheet music into MIDI files. So how well does it work? Will it do what you need it to do? We put it through a full array of tests and here's what we came up with.

First we need to say that not a single music scanning program we tried worked the way the ads indicated. Not a single piece of music other than Three Blind Mice scanned and played back correctly. What the ads don't reveal is the amount of tedious work necessary to get accurate playback from scans of intermediate and advanced pieces of music. An average classic Rachmaninoff or Debussy piece will take anywhere from 3 to 14 minutes per measure to correct assuming you are familiar with music notation and you understand the program's strange and often unpredictable behavior. For the new user, scanning piano classics of an intermediate or advanced level could easily require a week on the first one with many calls to tech support assuming they don't remind you that you are consuming a lot of their time.

We tested SmartScore with a broad range of sheet music and music from compilation books which are very common. The ads don't mention that ONLY AN ORIGINAL PIECE OF PRINTED SHEET MUSIC CAN BE USED. Musitek makes it abundantly clear on the phone that they don't support any problems with music scans of any copied or reproduced music no matter how good it looks. This sent us scrambling to the sheet music section of our local music store. Even some new printed sheet music does not qualify for results since much of it has undergone copy processing and may not be suitable. The real problem is the poorly designed optical recognition engine that makes accurate rendering impossible.

It's difficult to imagine why in this day and age with text recognition being so efficient and precise that the recognition of relatively big blobs of ink and some lines on a page would be so difficult. SmartScore has been in development for over twelve years now… a chilling thought for the future of scanning music and getting a midi file from it that you could actually learn from.

There is no indication in any of the Smartscore literature that any level of complexity that lies beyond SmartScore's abilities. And they haven't mentioned the editing time often required to get even a simple piece of music to play back correctly. For example we found that the program in its present condition (version 3.2) will require thirty to forty hours of tedious and frustrating editing to get Clair de Lune to play correctly (we never got that far). An experienced tech with years of familiarity with the program could probably cut that time in half. Success depends on familiarizing yourself with the numerous editing bugs that constantly plague any progress. This means learning workarounds and tricks… neither of which should be necessary if the program worked right… or if it was covered in the manual.

So here it is in plain English from our experience… if you intend to scan and play piano sheet music, you might achieve the advertised results under the following limitations…

First, you must use an original printed version of the sheet music… anything less and the manufacturer claims no responsibility for poor performance. Second, if the music is intermediate to advanced in complexity or has contrapuntal voices… accurate playback may takes days of editing for the new user. For some intermediate and advanced piano pieces; a week or more may be required of a new user before accurate playback is possible. (We define “new user” as an experienced computer user with a good knowledge of music notation). The advertisement claims “within seconds” you will have on screen an editable and PLAYABLE form of the music…but we were only able to reproduce that by scanning a beginner first grade Thompson book with those really big notes. Of course any scan is technically playable. A scan of Rhapsody in Blue that we made for a local college music department was a sobering experience for the enthusiastic professors who hoped to use SmartScore for a teaching aid. After all the careful scanning had been done a silence fell over the room as the moment of truth arrived… midi playback. As the first few bars of sound emerged from the speakers, the most unusual collection of perplexed faces I'd ever seen began to crack a few smiles. A few bars later and the whole room was engulfed in laughter. It sounded like some agitated chimps playing and was extremely funny.

Fortunately, at the time of this writing, SmartScore can be downloaded as a free demo. I strongly suggest you do just that if you intend to invest your money expecting to get any recognizable midi playback from a classical piano piece.

Some notes

Successful editing requires figuring out why SmartScore isn't playing according to what's on the screen. It can be very time consuming and frustrating because editing doesn't always have predictable results. For example, sometimes during editing, voices change color and undo's don't work making your little problem into a big one.

It's the counting and recounting of the measure and colors of the voices, the experimenting and the unpredictable reaction of the program at times… that can create more problems than what you began with. The problem centers on the fact that SmartScore doesn't consider the vertical alignment of notes and adjust the playback accordingly. Instead it takes each staff and independently processes the timing as it tries to figure out how to make it work. Doing that independently adds up to an enormous amount of editing work for the user and it's totally unnecessary. Spending hours trying to figure out why a measure isn't playing right is very stressful and wears hard… the music can look right but it just doesn't play right. It's a constant battle to determine which combination of colors (representing voices) will actually trick SmartScore to play it correctly.

Often the only remedy to fixing incorrect playback is what the tech support folks refer to as… ‘find another measure that kinda looks the same; delete the data from the target measure; copy and paste the data from the similar measure into the target measure and then readjust the pasted data in accordance with how the original measure looked. This workaround for a four hundred dollar program that has been in development for twelve years is ridiculous. What this points to again is, that the integrity of the midi data with the screen data can occasionally be off and the only way of correcting it is to blot out the offending measure and patch in another measure then move everything around to make it look the same as the original. This can be a very tedious and lengthy process.

MY NOTES

Sometimes the notes don't move in the edit shape window and occasionally it may take nearly ten seconds after a note is moved for it to execute the command.

Put in a rest and it's a crap shoot as to which voice/color it will be applied to. Then it often happens that as that rest appears on the screen… the other voices/colors you just carefully set… change colors and you're back to square one.

Figuring out a clever arrangement of colors/voices to get the measure to play right usually takes a little experimentation. Vertical alignment command sometimes helps but only half the time and there's no way to undo it without re-doing the whole measure. One would assume the vertical alignment feature would do just that… insure that the upper and lower notes or notes on upper and lower staves are going to play at the same time… but as we said, this only works about half the time.

The unpredictable results and lack of complete undo's add to the stress level. For example, in a given measure that wasn't playing right, we attempted to beam some notes that were intended to be beamed but the beam was broken. Rather than beaming the selected notes, SmartScore beamed across to another set of tuplets later in the measure… when the undo command was used the voice colors for the whole measure changed and could not be returned to their former assignments without a few minutes of further editing… editing something because the undo command isn't implemented properly. So just to get the voices to come out right so the midi file plays accurately may take hours of tinkering with the assignment of colors… just to compensate for SmartScores handicap of not time aligning both staffs simultaneously.

SmartScore isn't so smart when it makes its decisions about voicing. The primary consumption of editing time is due to errors and miscalculations the program frequently makes when piano scores get busy. It creates many incomplete voicing arrangements (coloring) of its own which have to be undone and corrected.

Blame is placed on the “poor scoring” and writing when SmartScore doesn't get something right.

All programs are wonderful when they work right which means they don't cost you valuable time correcting their mistakes. No one questions the difficulties involved with scanning a piece of piano sheet music and rendering an accurate playback. SS performance is reasonably accurate for simple music, but as the complexity of music increases so does the amount of time it takes to correct mistakes left behind by SmartScore recognition. For example, with a piece like Clair de Lune it could take a new user with a musical and windows background as much as a full week or more to get SmartScore to play it back 98% correctly. An experienced user who's learned all the little editing tricks, most of which are not covered in the manual, might accomplish the same task in a few hours. The problem became for us, to learn those tricks requires tech support and we were constantly reminded by staff that we had taken too much of their time already… as if our tech support was now being cut off.

A quick glance at SmartScore reviews shows that most were positive but they only centered on SmartScores ability to re-create a printed score NOT the accuracy of playing back from that score. It's getting accurate midi playback that plagues all the existing music scanning systems and piano music is potentially the most difficult because of the density of notes per staff.

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