IMSLP Forums

While surfing the internet, I found an English version of Mendelssohn's "Hear my prayer" (the version in German, "Hör' mein Bitten", is available already at IMSLP). I suppose it's public domain, as the music symbols look very old (Novello edition, probably end '800 to beginning '900). The scan quality is extremely poor. However, I found it useful to pinpoint some errors present in a CPDL edition, so it's definitely better than nothing. What to do with it? Upload at IMSLP in spite of the poor quality, or give up? Are there any minimum requirements to meet?

Max

I'm not aware of any quality requirements. Obviously, if we had our "druthers", we'd prefer better quality, but that assumes one has the source material on hand. As you said, something is better than nothing.

OK, uploaded.

Max

200 dpi is probably the lowest resolution you want to go.

300dpi is the minimum recommended resolution for music scores.

300 dpi worked fine for me. 200 dpi was unusable.

I just uploaded my own scan of Bohm Cavatina v p Op 314 no 2. The lst page of the v part is awful. I tried it at several different dpi from 200 to 800 and it was still pretty bad. Do you have any suggestions? (e.g. can it be tidied up with GIMP?) Regards WB

It looks like you've set your black-and-white threshold WAY too high, or that you're trying to scan a terrible copy of this score. Trying lowering the threshold considerably.

One thing you can do: have the scanner produce a gray scale image, and convert to black and white using the GIMP. (Colors -> threshold). This allows you to select the optimal threshold manually.

bartmeijer wrote:One thing you can do: have the scanner produce a gray scale image, and convert to black and white using the GIMP. (Colors -> threshold). This allows you to select the optimal threshold manually.

Thanks for the tip. I tried out the settings, changing it from 100 to 90 (whatever the units are) and got much better results. Please see the new first page of the vl part in the score. Regards WB

You're talking about your most recent upload? I see a difference on the second page of the violin part, but not the first. The second page still looks like it has a threshold set too high. While you can achieve some success with scanning in grayscale, I find the best solution is to scan in native 1-bit with a threshold that is appropriate to the material.