The scanning process

A scanner will take an image from a piece of paper and store it electronically as a graphics image - for example in "tiff" or "Windows bitmap" format.    Even if it is a page of music, this is just a picture: the computer knows nothing of the staves,. notes, rests, ... which are shown in the picture.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software has been available for a number of years years now to convert "pictures of text" obtained in this way to actual text files which you can edit with a word processor.

The equivalent software (music OCR software) to convert pictures of music into music files is now also available and has very much "come of age".    Optical Character Recognition is a complex, specialist problem and, just as  text OCR methods were developed independently of text editors and word processors, music OCR software has been developed independently of mozart and other music notation editors, by specialist developers.

mozart can work with any third party music OCR software which can store its results in NIFF format.   (NIFF = "Notation Interchange File Format" - a format designed in the 1990s to allow different notation programs to interchange data.)

The procedure is then

1. Scan the image into the desired graphics image file format

2. Apply the music OCR software to the image file and output a NIFF file.

3. Import the NIFF file into mozart

4. Save a mozart (.mz) file.
    

From there onwards you can use the full power of mozart to edit the music.

Caveat: OCR is a difficult process and prone to error, especially if the original image is not absolutely sharp and clear.   Fortunately OCR software usually allows you to make amendments by hand to the scanned image to correct any errors.  If using OCR software with mozart, you should do this assiduously before saving the NIFF file.  [mozart checks the number of beats in bars for you as you type music in and will not allow you to have the wrong number of beats in a bar.  The disadvantage of this manifests itself when importing NIFF files: if the time signature is unclear of if the notes in bars do not respect it, mozart may reject the entire bar.]

Available Music OCR Software

These days a number of music OCR packages are available. Some which export NIFF files which can then be imported into mozart are:

• SharpEye (from v1) http://www.visiv.co.uk
• PhotoScore (from v3.1) http://www.neuratron.com
• SmartScore (from v3)  http://www.musitek.com

Just as in the case of mozart itself, downloadable evaluation versions of these are available from their respective web sites.  Prices and user-interfaces vary considerably and we recommend you try them out and import their results into mozart if you need a music scanning capability.