Can anyone make recommendations for software (preferably OS X based, but windows based will also work) to scan music from a written score into a midi file?

I have a bunch of music for violin with a piano accompaniment that I'd like to scan in (so that I can play the accompaniment and let my computer play the violin part).

It would also be nice if the software could recognize guitar chords.

Are any of the midi-scanning type software packages worthwhile? Thanks

Warm Regards

I think the idea of score scanning itself turned out to be worthless after all. I tried out Midiscan v. 1.0 more then 10 years ago. The score was transfered to midi quite well, but the result all the same was unsatisfactory because of constant volume level the notes. In addition, some minor editing is needed after scanning in any case. I found it was much more convenient to make midi by step wise input, which is the feature of all sequencer software. It took less hassle and time and I could roughly define velocities of each note in melody.

Check out Photoscore Lite bundled with Sibelius. I've used it and found it's not very intuitive. The playback engine sucks IMO, maybe I'm too used to my DAW.

Indeed, OCR for plain text isn't even 100% yet. Sheet music is way more difficult, and the market for it is far smaller.

Another approach would be to transcribe the piece into MuseScore, and output it to MIDI, or just use the MuseScore playback function.

There are a lot of demos of commercial music scan softwares. Every big notation software company has one. It heavily depends on the source material. Just try some out. If the source is a professionally printed score from a newer book or printed with finale or similar, the result of current programms are quite goot (@lotal software has developed in the last 10 years, believe it or not ;-))

If its a badly scanned realbook or a handwritten score the results are varying. In any case you will have to edit the score afterwards. I had mixed results from perfect to almost rubbish with different products and different sources but in the end i decided, that it's not worth the money for my needs.