MusicyTechGeek

I, like many other musicians, have been collecting sheet music for as long as I’ve been playing. Although it is unlikely that a diaster can and will happen, it is something we should all prepare for. In the digital world we are taught that if you only have one copy you are vulnerable to loss. I backup my digital music library in several ways. First, I have it stored on a USB external hard drive for easy transportation to another computer if I need it. Secondly, I have it backed up on my computers internal hard drive, and then I have that hard drive cloned on a back up firewire drive so that I could use it as a bootable backup of my current workstation if something happens. This isn’t a complete backup setup, but I will soon be backing it up offsite so that I don’t have to worry about it if something happens to ALL of my hardware. I’ll write more on that later. I truely feel that I should digitize my sheet music collection so that if something happens and I lose my sheet music library that I can have access to it. Personally, I feel this falls within fair-use because as long as I don’t distrubute it, I should have the right to use the media how I want for personal use. Granted, this is debatable and people disagree, but if I paid for it I should be able to use it in my digital life in the way that best suits me. I have invested thousands of dollars in sheet music, and if I lost it, I would be financially difficult for me to replace, even if I could get most of it back with insurance. I already have a list of everything in my music library, including who it was written by, the price I paid for it, and the place I got it, and that is stored on my MobilMe drive offsite.

I recently got Sibelius 6, where previously I have been using Sibelius 3. It was a great gift from my partner, and it came with two trials of other music software that intigrate with it: PhotoScore and AudioScore. Photoscore is a program where you can scan your sheet music and it translates it into a file that can be imported into Sibelius. This allows opportunities for backup and easy editing and notes for a piece.

My goal: Backup my sheet music library in PDF, Sibelius, and MIDI format for personal use only.

Setup:
24″ iMac (Early 2009)
Canon Digital Camera (see Gdgt list)
Prizmo (Mac Application)
Photoscore Lite (demo version included with Sibelius 6)

I don’t currently own a scanner, and I didn’t want to get one for this purpose. I have a 12 MP digital camera that takes clear enough photos that I really don’t find it necessary to invest in a scanner that would take up much more room when I essentially could do the same thing with software. I started searching on the web, and I found a piece of software called Prizmo (for Mac). I decided to give it a try to see if it world work with Photoscore. I was unsure if it would, just because Photoscore has these requirements for it work with Mac scanning:

A scanner (probably connected to your computer via a USB, Printer or SCSI port), and installed Mac OS X TWAIN driver software (it is highly recommended you visit your scanner manufacturer’s website and download the latest version – also note that classic Mac OS TWAIN drivers will not work). You may need to contact your scanner manufacturer for information on installing a suitable TWAIN driver. If a Mac OS X TWAIN driver is not available for your scanner, you will need to scan using separate software, save suitable TIFF files, and open these in PhotoScore.

After doing some research to make sure that 1) TWAIN was built into OSX and 2) Making sure that I could export the right file type through Prizmo I got home and started playing with both programs to see how well it would work. Currently, I’m only using demo’s of both pieces of software, and once I get the money I will go ahead and buy the full versions of Photoscore and Audioscore (which I will dive more into later). Also, I will most likely be buying Prizmo, sooner rather than later, just because I can start taking the photos of my music now and then have it ready for Photoscore. Below is the differences between the Photoscore lite version (which I currently have installed) and the Ultimate Version (which I plan on buying):

Process:

1) Take a picture of the music with your digital camera.

2) Import into Prizmo, edit and rotate.

3) Export as PDF or TIFF. In this case, I’m exporting to TIFF because the demo only supports TIFF and the full version exports to PDF as well with text. Once I upgrade, I will export to PDF so that I can easily store and combine the PDFs.

4) Import music into Photoscore.

5) Export into Sibelius

6) Backup on harddrives and various places.

Note: The full version of Photoscore allows for text recognition, which means that I would not have to type and put all of that information in manually. Also, I use a sample of a simple score that will work, because obviously the full version can do a lot more than the lite version can. Once Prizmo is upgraded from the demo version, it will also allow for the image to be exported without the Prizmo watermark.

Links to mentioned software:

Sibelius 6
Prizmo
PhotoScore + AudioScore

Once I start the actual process and get it going, I will let you guys know how long it took (estimated) about about how much disk space it took to digitize my sheet music library. For me, currently, this was more of a proof of concept, and just solidified the fact that I don’t need to buy a scanner to do what I want to do!

Thanks for reading!

-Kyle