Brilliant and cleverly constructed.
Take a picture of the score and the app will play it for you – with all the dynamics in place – at a tempo and instrumentation of your choosing. As well as being fun to play with, this part of app reminded me (with some nostalgia) of an up-to-date version of the play-along Music Minus One recordings. But it’s absolutely vital that the quality of your original scan is high enough to get the best playback results. You can access scores directly from ISMLP (International Music Score Library Project), or by exporting and sending them to PlayScore 2. I was bowled over by the ability to change a score’s instrumentation for a completely different playback, which I did with a string quartet. Totally brilliant. PlayScore 2 is a great musical tool that behaves more like a musical spreadsheet. This means it’s perfect for sharing marked-up parts with others. Whether you’re a choirmaster, conductor or orchestral manager, it’s a real time-saver, and I can see many ways that this app could be indispensible. Rating 9/10
“If you’re like me, a teacher, and you spend a lot of time putting together play-along tracks for your students, then this app is really something of a dream.”
“There is so much that can be done with this app in concert with your DAW. Wherever you are in your musical career, and however you interact with music notation — I suspect there’s something useful for you.”
PlayScore 2. The PlayScore 2 app offers a compelling premise: Scan a score and hear it played back instantly. For musicians
navigating new repertoire, this is immediately appealing, and the app delivers a range of practical features. A free version lets users scan and hear playback directly in the app, making it easy to experiment before committing to a subscription.Playback flexibility is one of PlayScore’s greatest strengths. Users can adjust tempo without affecting pitch, allowing for slower, more deliberate listening or faster contextual runs. A pitch modifier enables playback in different keys or temperaments, which may be useful for both historical study and practical adaptation. The app supports both scanning through its camera interface and uploading PDFs (the
latter requiring a subscription).
So I can’t find much to fault: PlayScore 2 is a fabulously useful, easy‑to‑use app that will appeal to all sorts of musicians. You can try it out for nothing, and unlock advanced features for short periods if required, for about the price of a coffee and cake. It’s an example of really impressive tech implemented with a very light touch, in a way that really serves the user, at a low cost. I for one am always happy to have things like that around.
PlayScore can handle anything from double-checking you are playing the right notes to playing along with the orchestral part for a piano concerto. There’s wide use for this music reading technology in the practice room.
One area that I think can be particularly useful in a pianists development, is the ability to play/mute a single staff of piano music so I can play along when practicing hands separately.
An interview with PlayScore creator Anthony Wilkes
With the arrival of Dorico for iPad this past summer, it’s been exciting to dive in to the wider ecosystem of innovative apps for musicians available on the App Store. One of my own favourites is PlayScore, which is a sheet music scanning app that practically works like magic
Effortless Sheet Music Scanning:
Say goodbye to manual input with PlayScore 2’s seamless scanning capabilities.
For a fast and easy to use tool for students, hobbyists and professionals needing a way to quickly hear a piece of sheet music, PlayScore 2 gets a big thumbs up. For exporting to music notation software for editing, it is fast, with impressive accuracy
I have had a lot of success with PlayScore 2, it is easy to use and works very well. You can read multiple staves, mute individual instrument lines (or solo them), change the voices in the app, and, even more, you can save the file as MIDI or MusicXML. The files I have created have then imported really well into MuseScore, for further editing (nb you need to use the paid version of MuseScore for this feature, but it is very inexpensive).
In short, PlayScore 2 is a versatile and very powerful music scanning app.
Music Scanner App – PlayScore 2 Review & Tutorial by Music Repo
I have recently discovered Playscore 2 mobile app. Depending on one’s needs, this is a superb little app: you simply take a picture of your (good quality) score, and voila…you can make rehearsal tracks, change the tempo, transpose, and export the file in various formats, MusicXML being the most obvious one for me, etc. Then simply import it into your notation software, such as Sibelius, and do your editing, arranging and printing.
This app is terrific for either professional musicians who need to practice duets and can’t find anyone to do it or for students of any level who would like to practice with the music playing to double-check for any mistakes […] It is 100% recommendable for all musicians!
The perfect exercise tool!
The scales have become much cleaner and the songs accurate. Happy students, happy teacher, happy parents, happy audience at one of the future concerts […]
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Who needs an accompanist? This smart app can play any piece of sheet music for you.
PlayScore is a genuinely impressive, thoughtful, and useful tool that any musician should consider downloading.
You have a choice of up to 23 instruments per stave and as long the notation is clear, it will read the dynamics, articulation, repeats, ornaments and text as well as the pitches.
Best iPhone and iPad apps for musicians in 2021
Playscore 2 is a full notation music recognition app that’s a great addition to every singer’s toolkit. Just use your iPhone or iPad to take a picture of a music score or sheet music, and the app will play it back for you. You can even import music from PDF files.
Play Score 2 for Apple and Android devices – simply is a great technology to help people practice music.
The basic feature of this technology is that through the app you can take images of sheet music and play them back. You might say that with digital music these days it is as easy to find a recording with one of the streaming apps, but cleverly Playscore 2 takes in all the notes and information so that you play back the music in parts.
Take a photo of your violin concerto score or download it from a digital sheet music provider like IMSLP, and you can then play your part along with the orchestra (i.e., without the solo violin part playing back). Imagine you are practicing for a performance or concert and you could play along with the piano accompaniment with a quick photo of the score.
After using the app for several weeks and talking with the folks at PlayScore 2, it’s clear to me that the technology that’s used to make this app work the way it does is pretty remarkable and is constantly being improved upon.
When I was a little choirboy I used to dream that the notes on the pages would somehow play themselves for me and I wouldn’t have to figure out how the music was supposed to sound. It has taken a long time but my dream, and I am sure many other people’s, has come true.
The free app Playscore 2 does just that. You can snap a score with your camera and with the latest optical music recognition software it will play the lines of music back to you. It can work with any printed music at all – just open the app, take a photo using the app’s camera icon and it will automatically load and then play it back at whatever tempo you decide to set it at!
The music play back is indicated with a red line that scrolls bar by bar. You can easily change the tempo, which may help with learning a piece slowly before speeding things up. There are transposing features and loop options. If you decide to go further and upgrade to the full, paid version, you can even export the file as a MusicXML file and open it in other notation programs such as Dorico or Sibelius.
PlayScore 2 is a useful app that can read sheet music and play it out loud. This means that you can use it to help you establish what certain drum notation parts sound like when you’re not entirely sure.
You can upload full scans to the app, and then it will play the parts out loud and give you the option of adjusting the tempo. This is brilliant for learning and understanding note values.
The app also lets you take pictures with an onboard camera. The picture function works surprisingly well.
