Scanning music into finale

You can scan any kind of sheet music into Finale with PlayScore 2. Because this app handles all the minute details like slurs, dynamics and articulation, importing scores into Finale is the best way for it to read sheet music.

To scan your music, just click on PlayScore 2’s Camera button and take pictures until you have snapped all the pages you need. To scan a PDF, open the score in Safari (or in your standard web browser for Android users) and choose ‘Copy to PlayScore 2’.

Next, tap the Export button and choose Save as MusicXML. You’ll see the normal export screen come up onto your device, so send the MusicXML file to yourself by email. Open your email and download the file from there; it will directly go into your “Downloads” folder on your computer.

If you’re a Mac user, simply tap the Airdrop button on your device’s export screen once you’ve tapped the Export button and Save as MusicXML. Then, the file will automatically transfer over to your Mac. “Scanning Music into Finale” shows you all of the above steps.

Once you’ve transferred your MusicXML file to your computer, open up Finale and import it from your “Downloads” folder. You should see essentially the same notation as you did in PlayScore 2. You can then edit and arrange your score as required.

When PlayScore 2 reads pages of music for import, it works in the background as you take a snap, so the MusicXML is ready to export afterwards. And how does the app read all of that music? The answer: the OCR that transcribes music with PlayScore 2 is called Music OMR (Optical Music Recognition). OMR reads the notes, accidentals, articulation, slurs, even tremolo using an amazing computational process, which is also designed for exporting music into notation software programmes like Finale.

Before you know it, your scores will be scanned into Finale in a matter of minutes that you’ll wonder why you’ve never exported your music with PlayScore 2!