Hi,

I have a Casio Privia keyboard with MIDI connections, a sound card for my PC with MIDI connections...

1) Is there a software program that will allow me to play my arrangement via my Casio keyboard and then notate it for me automatically as I'm playing? In other words, the software translates my playing, as is, into notated music.

My main motivation is time savings:right now to make an arrangement I have to do it note by note and it takes a long time.

2) How about scanning sheet music into a notation software program so I don't have to input sheet music note for note if I want to alter the arrangement a bit?

I bought Sibelius First (the cheap version) recently, and initial results for producing notation from live playing are pretty lousy. I haven't played with it much yet though. The main problem is the timing - it's very difficult to play in strict time, and the note durations are not correct. On a more positive note(!), the user forum is very active and I was able to get help with an unrelated problem very quickly.

Greg.

There's a pretty powerful freeware called MuseScore, but it accepts MIDI input in 'step time' rather than real time - that is, it doesn't calculate relative note durations. Input is step-by-step (note-for-note) without regard to rhythm, and you have to change notes' durations from your computer as you go.

Scanning of music is, so far as I'm aware, in its infancy. There are programs that claim to do it (for a price), and freeware that I've never heard anything positive about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_OCR

I couldn't get MIDI input to work at all in MuseScore - some others have the same problem. There's a forum thread about the problem here: http://musescore.org/en/node/12098

Greg.

FWIW I'm really sorry to hear that, Greg. I love MuseScore, but I'd be pretty disappointed if MIDI input weren't at least an option for me. I feel lucky, especially considering how outdated my hardware is! I admit that latency is a minor issue for me, but I have no idea what it's attributable to given all the variables.

I have used both Sibelius and Notation Composer, and it's hard to get accurate notation playing in real time. Lot's of cleaning up to do afterwards.

Notation Composer, costing much less than Sibelius, does a much better job at opening midi files...... and it's very easy to have it split hands correctly, if the original opening of the midi file gives more staves than expected.

NC also has a feature which allows you set the bars in real time on playback, though I have not tried it yet.

I also have scanned music with Photoscore Ultimate, it works along with Sibelius.
I scan the sheet music to PDF ..... then PU scans the pdf and sends it to Sibelius.
Needs cleaning up, but faster then putting the whole score in manually.

I have used SharpEye for years to scan scores into a notation program (I use ScoreWriter, inexpensive and very good). SharpEye is excellent and very accurate. I have used it for 4 part (SATB) and piano scores. The original needs to be reasonably clean and not too small. There is a free demo you can try.

For inputting live music into a notation program I also use ScoreWriter. But inputting anything more complicated than a melody is a real chore. What I usually do is try to find a sheet to scan or a midi of the desired score and import that into ScoreWriter. The midi's usually require a lot of clean up.

Great, thank you everyone.
Being able to scan in a melody / input a recorded midi that i have to clean up would save a whole lot of time. I hadn't heard about some of these and the options all look promising.

The following program is still in its initial version (which is amazing when you consider when it was first introduced). Most famous composers have used Version 1. It's inexpensive and can be used when there's a power outage.

I have looked for something like what Bruce is looking for in the past. The bad news is that there doesn't seem to be anything that really works well. You usually get a mess of odd-ball notes because the software is trying to allow for every little timing issue that gets introduced because we do not play every notes exactly the correct length.

I am still wondering why you could not at least instruct the software to only use a particular set of note values (Whole, Half, Quarter, Eighth) and force the software to pick the nearest one as you play. It would seem that it might then be usable anyway.

I am sure somebody has already thought of that. So, I guess it does not work well either or it would be available.

awesome! i'm going to have to try this program

i can never get real time recording correctly.. it's so hard to play in strict time