January 2008
"THE RESULTS WERE CLOSE TO PERFECT"
"If the spacing of the accents hadn't changed I would have thought I was looking at the scan itself, not the resulting notation file."
"Setup was hassle-free. PhotoScore had no trouble communicating with my HP OfficeJet J5870 scanner."
"The results were close to perfect - PhotoScore captured all the notes, accidentals, slurs, dynamics, staccato dots, and accent marks."
"PhotoScore is an excellent choice."
April 2008
"SIGNIFICANT EDUCATIONAL BENEFITS FROM USING THE PROGRAM"
"AudioScore adopts the novel approach of creating musical scores through musical performance rather than manually entering the notation."
"There are some significant educational benefits from using the program: firstly, it is possible to use AudioScore to tell you if you are singing or playing out of tune; secondly, you gain inside knowledge of how the performance of a piece and the score relate to one another."
January 2007
"AN UNUSUALLY INTELLIGENT APPLICATION"
"If you are not MIDI savvy, fret no more. AudioScore Professional by Neuratron is an unusually intelligent application designed for microphone-to-score input."
"AudioScore has a number of unique features; to automatically create high-quality pitch scores, Mic-To-Score™ is used instead of MIDI keyboard; no prior musical knowledge and virtually no user intervention are required."
"Accurately converts monophonic wave audio to MIDI, MusicXML and NIFF."
November 2006
"ACCURATE RESULTS ... SIMPLE WORKFLOW ... IT DOESN'T DISAPPOINT"
"Digitise your sheet music with this ingenious app."
"A superb tool... PhotoScore is a real time-saver."
Incorporated Society of Musicians Music Journal
"PRODUCES REMARKABLY ACCURATE RESULTS"
"PhotoScore Professional 4 is a very useful program which will save enormous amounts of time."
"an admirable product producing remarkably accurate results."
"MUST BE SOMETHING SPECIAL"
"PhotoScore Professional makes a remarkably accurate job of [scanning a page of sheet music]."
"PhotoScore Professional does a fantastic job of interpreting a wide variety of music scores."
"Did you know that Toyota has invented a trumpet-playing robot? It's true: you can read all about him [here]. 'It may be better-looking than me', commented one trumpet player, 'and it probably won't need as much oiling - but can it read music?'. Possibly not, but if Toyota was to implant a copy of PhotoScore into this mechanical muso's brain he and his buddies (he's forming a robot band) would probably be able to add sight reading to their list of talents."
"SCANNING COMES OF AGE"
"I approached this review with a bit of skepticism, I walked away a believer."
"Doing even a bad job of sorting a sharp from a flat from a natural, correctly interpreting bar lines and brackets, and deciphering complex rhythms is a noteworthy accomplishment; doing it well is miraculous. PhotoScore does it well, and I found that I could scan a page of material and have it in Sibelius ready to edit, annotate, transpose, or print in a matter of minutes."
"SERIOUSLY IMPRESSIVE!"
"The tempo, title, clef and all markings were picked up without a single error. After I had stopped looking at the screen like a goldfish for a minute, I then hit playback, and heard the whole first page of the score played back accurately using the default piano voice of my midi soundcard. This was seriously impressive!"
"Any musical director, arranger, composer, or other musician who regularly works with printed manuscripts has to have this software, it is as simple as that. Photoscore is one of those utilities that once used become an essential part of the way you work, simply because it saves many hours of tedious work. The scanning and reading of scores is of an accuracy comparable to the best OCR software for text, and the software performs this minor miracle quickly and efficiently."
"Put simply, a mature and effective solution that makes you wonder why you didn't buy it before. Highly recommended!"
"AN IMPRESSIVE PIECE OF SOFTWARE"
"The overall results were impressive and the whole process certainly didn't take as long as first expected."
"PhotoScore Professional is an impressive piece of software that produces quick and, on the whole, reliable results."
"A MOST USEFUL PROGRAM"
"It proved very simple to use... I experimented with some quite complex piano music, some chamber music and an orchestral score: I was impressed with the results... Scanning music in via PhotoScore certainly saves time... Manages to make a complex and sophisticated process easy to operate."
Yippee.net awards PhotoScore a maximum 5 out of 5 rating.
"I can imagine this [PhotoScore] saving A LOT of time for many people out there who have to slave over a score putting it into MIDI by hand. PhotoScore also has amazing accuracy when reading from the music sheet. Brilliant. A recommended download."
The French edition of Macworld gives PhotoScore an outstanding 4½ out of 5 rating.
"[PhotoScore est] un programme simple à utiliser et remarquablement efficace... une conception sans faille... un véritable tour de force... En conclusion. PhotoScore, très régulièrement mis à jour, garantit une reconnaissance de plus en plus fine des partitions musicales... un bien beau logiciel qui fera gagner des heures de copie aux musiciens amateurs et professionnels."
[English translation] "[PhotoScore is] a simple to use and remarkably effective program... a conception without fault... a real tour de force... In conclusion. PhotoScore, which is very regularly updated, guarantees an increasingly accurate recognition of musical scores... a very beautiful piece of software that will save amateur and professional musicians hours of copying."
Top music industry magazine Music Week explains the importance of PhotoScore.
"Breakthroughs in computer technology have also brought benefits to sheet music company backroom boys... software development house Neuratron has recently launched a PhotoScore software programme which will allow publishers for the first time to make high speed and fully accurate archive copies of sheet music titles.
"Such an application could provide sheet music publishers with the key to making titles comprehensively available over the internet. This follows a number of experiments during the past six years whereby sheet music has been electronically available through stand-alone consoles or by fax."
"PhotoScore Lite... can scan in printed music and read it intelligently... This represents a massive advance in the technology, and only a respectful silence will do as musicians begin to realise what this will mean for them."
"PhotoScore Lite does a remarkable job... it transcribes notes, accidentals and rhythms with a high degree of accuracy."
"Optical Manuscript [PhotoScore's original name on RISC OS] is the world's most advanced musical OCR package"
"In short, it's an amazing piece of software which does a very difficult job remarkably well."
"Have all of you looked at my notes?"
"They're terrific," I say... "It must have taken you weeks to key all our parts in," I say.
"Oh no," says Billy. "I just scanned it in from a score - just scanned it in, cleaned it up, adjusted the odd clef, and printed it out. It's amazing what you can do these days." His eyes light up with the possibilities. "My programme now has a playback setting for piano called espressivo [a PhotoScore feature] - a few controlled irregularities, and you can hardly tell it's a computer that's playing, not a human being. Soon they'll perfect it, and you won't be able to tell. Performers will be redundant for all practical purposes..."
"I suppose composers won't," snaps Piers.
"Oh, yes," says Billy in joyful contemplation of his own obsolescence.
[Buy this book at amazon.com.]
