Re: Scanning music OCR to lilypond?

[Graham Percival]

On Fri, 30 May 2003 10:01:43 -0400
Daniel Ashton <address@hidden> wrote:
> Is anyone aware of a way to scan music into lilypond format?

I very much doubt it.  The best way I can think (in the near future)
would be to use a commercial windows program (possibly under Wine) to
scan the music, then export that sheet music to midi, then use midi2ly
to get lilypond notation.

In the longer term, you could get involved in some of the open-source
OCR projects and start applying them to sheet music.  Clara OCR is one
such project (a brief glance at the FAQ shows that they "train" their
program by using feedback from many users; I don't know if other OCR
projects do that too).
http://www.claraocr.org/   (that site also contains links to other
Linux OCR projects)

If you want to start such a project, I recommend that you try to create
an "OCR to MusicXML" project (rather than one focused on Lilypond code),
since then you have a better chance of involving people from other Linux
music programs.  But in my completely unfounded armchair estimation,
such a project would be nowhere near usable for at least a year.

OTOH, that's true of _every_ project, and once it's done, it'd be a huge
boost for Mutopia and related sites.  Don't let me discourage you from
such a task!

Cheers,
- Graham