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.”
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.
For anyone not familiar with this little piece of technical wizardry, this app allows users to scan a score and hear playback almost instantaneously […] my GCSE class had a fantastic day of making dance remixes from the MIDI data the app lifted from Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata.
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 […]
Share this information with little musicians and make their lives easier (and yours, too)!
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.
Miraculous App
I’m really impressed how well this app reads scores. Also the playback is very ‘musical’; all articulations are implemented. Of course it depends on the quality of your input file. But even so, it’s much better than I thought possible.
Extraordinary, essential functionality at a bargain price
I use PlayScore 2 for reading and replaying vocal scores on an iPad, and I cannot imagine being without it. It’s 100% accurate on some complex Bach pieces, drops to 95% where the scan (or errors in the original score?) upsets it but the few occasions when that won’t do I can export to a music editing program to tidy it up.
Support is excellent, I logged a call regarding Family Sharing not working and by 11 am (UK time) next day they provided a solution.
Great app
Best music scanner
Works great and much better than the alternatives I have tried. Also really friendly support, as others have mentioned. I signed up for professional subscription which is definitely worth it for me.
This app was a life saver for helping me teach vocals for a musical. Great job!
PlayScore 2 is an excellent app for music students at all levels
Very effective overall
A great app. Great for quick scanning of sheet music for practice.
Very good recognition of good quality scores
This is a serious music recognition app with the ability to reliably pick up just about all the details of complex scores. Multi-page PDF files can be loaded and the results of the recognition can also be exported in Music XML, meaning you can load it into most music notation programmes. There are some options for transposing instruments too.
The main caveat here is that you can only expect these excellent results if you use good quality scores. The old computing principle of “garbage in, garbage out” applies. With so many people making scores available freely online it is inevitable that some are of limited quality and this will impair the recognition process, although you will still get some useable results.
The automatic playback of successfully recognised music is particularly flexible and impressive, taking account of phrasing and dynamic markings.
A wonderful App and really useful for students
Fantastic app!
The App played score perfectly, easy to use. Perfect
PlayScore 2: Music Software Review
This app is a neat little package. It is easy to use for musicians and teachers at all levels. For anyone (including non music readers) who wants a quick overview of a printed score, it is equally useful. It is also very good value. A full description of its functions is given on the App Store.
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
“Just wanted to let you know that I am SUPER impressed. Threw a semi-complex choral piece at PlayScore to move it into Dorico, and it did a pretty awesome job, especially on the multiple voices in the piano part. Saved me a lot of time. Thanks so much.”
“I recently needed to create rehearsal tracks for my choir. The singers aren’t generally technically savvy enough to use PlayScore themselves to play their parts, so I export MusicXML from PlayScore and import it to Dorico. From there, I edit the score as necessary, and then export audio tracks for the singers…all I needed to do was expand the choral parts from two staves to four so I could export each vocal line separately. The piano part came in 100% correct. I couldn’t be happier. This has saved me hours of effort!”
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.
PlayScore 2 just might be the most impressive app in the entire App Store…A simple and easy to use software solution.
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.
Great app for singing..
I have been researching score scanning for a few years, mainly on PC, and now find this wonderful app for IOS. I use it on my IPad and works a treat. I have been scanning in some Messiah solos which it has done well taking into account the complexity of music. Also great that one can export as MIDI or MusicXML for DAW or Notation software.
Finally great and passionate support.
Almost 100% perfect!
This app, is perfect for my needs (amateur choir) to get the music and practise a specific part. The play line really helps for practising phrasing and you get the benefit of having the lyrics, which you wouldn’t get if you export to a musicxml app.
It has been accurate in reading the notes, which is amazing it has also saved me hours and hours compared with the last app which I needed to capture a page, export it into MuseScore to join the pages (and the musescore mobile app seems to want a subscription to play it back). I also tried using musescore’s pdf scanner which you have to wait for (it does it on the website) and it had a lot of mistakes, and that was from a scan instead of a photo, with this app I am finding no errors from scans and very few from phone camera (usually my fault with lighting)
It is well worth reading the how to use page on their web site (which didn’t do initially), sometimes there may be a problem with a poor image and the web site tells you how to deal with it.
The app developer is amazingly responsive and when you couple that with how inexpensive it is for a year it is pretty incredible. I probably didn’t need the £14 version as since I have got this I don’t need to export to midi of musicxml, but it is still great value.
I have had the odd quirk, but the app developer is so responsive that I am sure the app will get better and better rapidly.
It gets the job done and its pretty amazing how it can read everything.
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.
Play Score is an exciting new development which will benefit performers, composers and teachers in a variety of different ways. The chance to quickly hear what is on a page of music will surely be a great help to us all
Love it
I take piano lessons and this app is great to capture sheet music and play back. Simple to use. I was able to quickly grab my files from SheetMusicPlus and import. Worth the subscription fee.
Learning the violin
Great app to get to know pieces when learning for the first time on the violin.
very good app
I could rely on this app to quickly read my sheet music when I needed and it was, as well, surprisingly accurate. It could read my sheets from photograph and play it back to me. There were some sharp notes it did not read but this was still really good when you think about it. Either way, this app was very smart and i’m so happy I found it when I did.
Excellent tool. I was able to convert the sheet music to xml. Mostly accurate and very quick.
You NEED to be able to get good quality pictures of your music for this to work, but if you do this app is wonderful! It rarely ever messes up notes […] Great for being able to hear a piece you’ve just picked up – would definitely recommend!
Wow! I use this to scan printed music, save as xml, and open in Dorico. For the price it is pretty impressive, and there aren’t many things it trips up on.
Best sheet music reader. I made an annual subscription and so happy for the decision.
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.
Assessing PlayScore 2
It is great to see such a capable new product entering the OMR market!
Technology in Music Education
I’m pleased to be able to recommend PlayScore 2 to you as an additional tool to add to your tool kit. I’d recommend the annual subscription due to the cost savings (only three months of a monthly subscription)