TromboneChat

Hey everyone!

I'm going to be involved in a long term project to archive the complete music library of the Moravian Trombone Choir of Downey, California. The one and the same group founded by Jeff Reynolds, Bass Trombone LA Phil. (Retired) Most of the music, some 900 pieces, are handwritten scores and parts and I need some suggestions for large scale document scanners. Price point between $1500 and $3500.

It should be able to scan paper up to 11x17 inches, have decent resolution, in other words sharp enough that PhotoScore software can "read" it with high accuracy. Currently the paper scores and original hand copied parts are in a former members' home. After scanning everything (which will take some time) the scans will be converted to Music XML files and stored on 2 hard-drives and on the Cloud.

Jeff will be involved in this project and guiding me on editing the music. We had already been sending music back and forth to each other. I will need to get going on the scanner thing pretty soon so any and all input will be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Matt Varho
Bass Trombonist Finest City Wind Orchestra, Finest City Brass Ensemble
Former Director Downey Moravian Trombone Choir

In your experience, does PhotoScore work well with handwritten music? My experience with it, even with the Ultimate version, errors are introduced that make it a pain fixing. I've given up on using it for handwritten music. For me it literally would be faster to just start with a blank page and input the parts by reading the originals. Too much work.

I'm open to suggestions from this forum about software also. I've only used a trial version of PhotoScore (Lite) and yes, it was a pain. Neuratron claims "Ultimate" is something like 99.5% accurate for scanning PDFS, but I cannot say if it's good enough to rely on for handwritten music.

In any event, I will need a large format scanner that will make clear, good resolution images for the archive. I can always deal with hand inputting into Sibelius. Been doing it long enough that I'm pretty good at it and like I said, this is a Long Term Project. I feel very committed to this. Too much great music to be sitting idle in dusty steel cabinets.

If the source material is good enough, handwritten might work with still a lot of correcting. I've tried different methods of processing oversized material, and even tried using an Apple app for scanning using an iPhone, but all methods were too much work for me to continue. I think the scanner idea you have is probably the best option. I have entertained paying a local vendor to do the scanning for me, but didn't follow through with that. I know there are companies out there doing exactly that and once scanned in, you can process it any way you want.

The bigger question still remains: Which scanners to a really good job in the $1500-$3000 price range. I'm looking for personal experience from TChat folks.

Do you need a flat bed or a feeder? If the scores are loose sheets you can use a feeder, and it will go faster. If the scores are bound or stapled, you'll want to place them one by one by hand on a flat bed. I've been using an HP flat bed with good results, but I'm not doing bulk, and mine is not 11x17. I use a free scanner software called NAPS2. It allows regrouping sheets into individual files.

My preference would be flat bed, yes. One page of Judy Green score paper will work on a platen made to read 11x17 inches. If I open the pages so both are viewable I'd need to go with a 12x24 inch scanner, which is not out of the realm of possibilities. It seems like some of these really big ones utilize a feeder and not a flat glass surface. Again, looking for input. Not married to any one way of doing things at this stage. I don't want to make a purchase then find out later that, "Oh, you shoulda bought one of these..."

Thanks for your reply.

Honestly, if it is bound scores ... I would use a high resolution camera on a mount intended for that job, not a scanner, and then use a good PDF software to straighten and down-res to 300-600 DPI. Photoscore won't work with a high DPI scan anyways.

The best scores from manuscripts on IMSLP are not scans, they are massively high res photos converted to PDF.

For scanning I bought a Brother MFC-J-6710DW all-in-one. Used it to scan music for the orchestra. Also was able to print ledger sized parts when needed. Can feed a stack of parts, but be careful. Jams are pretty common.

I think there may be a newer model now. Mine is around 15 years old.

Thanks! It was easy to find the newer model, and I plan to only feed one sheet in at a time. Also, does the Brother product have the option to open the lid and place paper in directly on the platen, or auto feed only?

baBposaune wrote: ↑Thu Oct 24, 2024 4:32 pm Thanks! It was easy to find the newer model, and I plan to only feed one sheet in at a time. Also, does the Brother product have the option to open the lid and place paper in directly on the platen, or auto feed only?

I rarely used the feeder. The scan works great with the 11x17 glass. Scans to PDF (at least that's what I did; there may be other options)

BGuttman wrote: ↑Thu Oct 24, 2024 5:14 pm

baBposaune wrote: ↑Thu Oct 24, 2024 4:32 pm Thanks! It was easy to find the newer model, and I plan to only feed one sheet in at a time. Also, does the Brother product have the option to open the lid and place paper in directly on the platen, or auto feed only?

I rarely used the feeder. The scan works great with the 11x17 glass. Scans to PDF (at least that's what I did; there may be other options)

Actually scanning to PDF would be just what I need. PDFs can be converted after the fact. Seems like the current Brother model goes for around $450 and that's below my budget. This suggestion is very promising.

The Brother has software to connect to a PC. I repurposed an old laptop to be a "scanner server". Page scans get their own names, and I used Libre Office Impress to stitch he individual pages together to create multi page parts.

11x17 is big enough for most scores, yes?

Just realized that handwritten sheet music cannot be saved as a .pdf. Doesn't matter for my purposes really.

I suggest getting both the Brother scaner mentioned (I have one and it works great). If you are on Windows, NAPS2 is great - free also - software that can be used to scan with Brother (and other) printers. I recommend USB connection, it's about 5x faster than Wifi.

Also, Harrison is right, if this stuff is bound then this type of setup is super common:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1c8388v/book_scanner_update/

There are apparently kits out there to build these and I thought about making one awhile ago but never got around to it.

FWIW, I am really fast with Dorico (I just input five handwritten brass quintet pieces, fully engraved, last night in about two hours). I would be happy to assist with the digitization of this. Exporting to XML is trivial.

I'm just saying -- $3K is a lot for such a limited use case. I would think about using the camera setup if someone already had a good digital camera, or renting, or bringing the materials to be scanned somewhere.

That would be a lot less than buying a super expensive scanner.

Also, images can be saved as PDF, so handwritten scores can also be saved as PDF files. Depending on the score reading software, keeping the scores as images might work better, might not.

Absolutely, a decent scanner (even an all in one laser printer scanner) AND a setup can be achieved for under $1500. 150dpi would be perfectly acceptable for this especially if the idea is to digitize them by engraving them in XML

Matt K wrote: ↑Fri Oct 25, 2024 4:29 am I suggest getting both the Brother scaner mentioned (I have one and it works great). If you are on Windows, NAPS2 is great - free also - software that can be used to scan with Brother (and other) printers. I recommend USB connection, it's about 5x faster than Wifi.

Would an Ethernet connection be faster than USB? Some scanners have that option.

Matt

baBposaune wrote: ↑Thu Oct 24, 2024 11:34 pm Just realized that handwritten sheet music cannot be saved as a .pdf. Doesn't matter for my purposes really.

Actually, they can. The "pdf" format is, at a high level, a container of other formats. One format can be a bitmap picture format like "tiff" or "jpeg". When you scan something to a pdf, the scanner application takes a bitmap format and encapsulates it in the pdf. If you go to the Wikipedia page on PDFs, this it the Raster Images object

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF

The other types of objects inside the PDF are the traditional text of a Postscript page description or a vector description of the graphics. But these other objects "know" about text, i.e. characters drawn with fonts and how they are arranged on page. Or the vector graphics objects "know" about lines drawn on the page.
The Raster Image is just a blob of pixels that goes on the page in a particular spot.

My experience with Photoscore Lite is that handwritten music isn't recognized very accurately. Printed music is more accurate, but it still gets confused at times. Maybe the full version of Photoscore is better?

If the goal is to get the music into a notation program, (such as Finale(rip), Dorico, Sibelius or to MusicXML), scanning with Photoscore Lite can save some time. But, there is still a lot of clean-up to do before you have a useable score.

-Jess

If the goal is to get the music into a notation program, (such as Finale(rip), Dorico, Sibelius or to MusicXML), scanning with Photoscore Lite can save some time. But, there is still a lot of clean-up to do before you have a useable score.

-Jess

That ship has sailed. Enough people have confirmed on and off this list that even with PhotoScore Ultimate there is more clean-up to do than if you just hand input everything from the get-go.

So I will not be doing more with the scans other than saving them as PDFs, then reading them off a monitor and engraving them in Sibelius.

New topic: are phone apps like Genius Scan and others worth considering when I have roughly 22k pages of scores to deal with and want to save all the scans on a hard drive. I have musician friends who swear that phone apps are worthy of my consideration but I'm worried they could be too wonky for someone like me who is more at home with keyboard and mouse on PC.

22,000 pages!?!?! Wow. I know I offered to have you come to my house and do it on my office copier/scanner, but any way you cut it 22,000 pages is a huge undertaking.

I wonder if it would be worth it to just take it to a service and have them scan it? For my previous business, when we had large copy runs we'd have a service do it for us, and I believe it ran us about $0.05 per page or less.

baBposaune wrote: ↑Fri Oct 25, 2024 9:31 am

Matt K wrote: ↑Fri Oct 25, 2024 4:29 am I suggest getting both the Brother scaner mentioned (I have one and it works great). If you are on Windows, NAPS2 is great - free also - software that can be used to scan with Brother (and other) printers. I recommend USB connection, it's about 5x faster than Wifi.

Would an Ethernet connection be faster than USB? Some scanners have that option.

Matt

My experience is USB > Ethernet > Wifi which includes if your computer is on wifi too. Everything being connected to ethernet is barely slower than USB though so if both are eth you'd be fine.

For that many pages, and with your budget, I would pay a pro to do that job. That's a ton of work

Ton of work sure but this has been a pet project of mine for years. I can do it myself for less than .05 cents per page including the cost of a medium priced, 11x17 scanner. Plus, I have the time. As an active musician in the San Diego area I still can set aside 3-4 hours a day, 4-5 days a week to tackle this. I'm not in a hurry. Plus I want to control the originals, the workflows and quality of the final product, whether it's the scans themselves or the notated scores and parts. I'm not a control freak. I feel honored to have been entrusted to do this job, so it really doesn't matter how big it is or how long it takes.

Besides, even if after buying external drives for storage, a bigger monitor and it all came to around a grand I could do a GoFundMe.

baBposaune wrote: ↑Fri Oct 25, 2024 9:59 am New topic: are phone apps like Genius Scan and others worth considering when I have roughly 22k pages ...

Yes. I've never attempted anything close to the size of the project you are undertaking but I use ScannerPro on my iPhone and I think it's great. It only takes a few seconds per page. It's easy to put multiple pages into a single document, it finds page edges automatically, and I have it configured to automatically save every scan to Google Drive. The quality of each scan is great.

baBposaune wrote: ↑Fri Oct 25, 2024 4:15 pm Besides, even if after buying external drives for storage, a bigger monitor and it all came to around a grand I could do a GoFundMe.

I highly recommend you don't use external storage for this project. Such drives are often what you could essentially call "B" stock drives, and what allows them to connect to USB is an interface that frequently causes corruption. They're OK-ish for things like where you have a small laptop and want to have a local copy of a set of files synced from the cloud (OneDrive, GoogleDrive, Dropbox, etc.), but as the only means of storage, it's a risky choice.

3,2,1 is the best strategy - 3 copies, 2 onsite, 1 off-site.

If you need any help ensuring that the raw images are stored durably, up don't hesitate to reach out, I would be happy to ensure they are adequately backed up.

Speaking of storage... getting the best quality scan might be more important than immediate music-recogniztion. I suspect music-recognition will work BETTER with a top quality scan.

In my experience, a top quality scan is NOT necessarily higher dots per inch. The key is just enough dots per in WITH highest contrast. One of my most highly respected friends scanned a ton of trombone choir library. Many of the results were huge files, and in some cases developed Moire patterns and other artifacts that rendered hours of work unreadable.

If you can process these files to be true "black and white" rather than shades of grey you'll likely be glad you did. Pure black and white will give the music-recognition sharp edges to recognize. Pure black and white will take a small fraction of the storage of an 8 or 16 bit gray or color scan.

Since you are looking at 22k of these, I second Harrison's camera suggestion.
I have quite a bit of experience scanning music and slides with Hamrick Software's Vuescan. Great software. BUT every scanner I've used seems to take longer and longer to scan as the project wears on. Add on top of that the time to set things up, THEN rescan to check out revised settings... kind of a bottmless pit.

I just switched from a Nikon film scanner to copying slides with an APS-C camera and slide adapter. I got the whole batch I'd been working on done in one afternoon. I was lucky to have enough patience to do a dozen each afternoon on the scanner.

If you get the right camera you can run it tethered on your PC. That means you'd be able to check each setting change immediately. Instead of waiting a number of seconds for a scanner to complete its run, your camera would get the next shot in fractions of a second. That will add up over 22k sheets!

Great project! Best of luck on it!

Dave Adams

Been getting lots of good input on how to handle a large library of manuscript scores. Having weighed the Pros and Cons of Document Cameras vs. Scanners, All-in-One machines, I'm heavily leaning toward getting the CZUR Aura Pro. It scans with enough resolution, can do 2 seconds per page and has image flattening in the software to fix any curvature in the paper. Price is very reasonable and once I learn the software I should be up and running in no time.

Still open to suggestions on doc cams if any music librarians out there like certain brands and models that make clear images and have easy to use software.