IMSLP Forums

Just registered and am interested in music that's in the public domain. There's a British outfit called Neurotron and they sell a computer program called Photoscore Ultimate 5 (they may be up to 6 or higher by now). It allows a user to scan sheet music and convert it to a WAV or MP3 file. The result - to someone as musically ignorant as myself - is work of adequate quality.

As a member of a community TV station I'm looking for a variety of sheet music in the public domain that I can convert to WAV or MP3 files for the members to use in their own productions. Many people in the US believe that anything copyrighted in the US by a "United States person" prior to a day in the summer of 1923 is now in the public domain because the copyrights expired before Congress extended them.

Unlike printed texts, music can have a compuser, arranger, lyricist, etc. and anyone who performs it can claim additional rights to further confuse the issue.

Scanning sheet music published before 1923 into Photoscore results in an audio file that no one can claim infreinges on anyone's "intellectual property" rights.

Does anyone out there have any experience with Neuratron or Photoscore?

I've used both and the results are spotty. Provided you have best case scenarios across the board, which includes 1.) scanning at their recommend color space and bit depth, 2.) have immaculate printed music to work from, and 3.) the music was fairly recently-produced typesets, then you can get up to about 80% accuracy, sometimes better with very simple music. As far as OMR (optical music recognition) goes, I've had the best results with SharpEye.