Using photos of sheet music in Songbook +

[StuartR]

I just recently discovered Songbook +. I guess I must have been living under a rock until now.😲

It took me all of 30 minutes to load all my existing Chordpro files into Songbook and convert them to pdf's. Linking them to the Genos with the Yamaha Bluetooth adapter and Pageflip pedal took only another 15 minutes. This software was well worth the asking price, just as everyone promised.

I now want to get existing sheet music into Songbook and am trying to photograph each page. So far I've found it better to use a digital camera, rather than the one in the iPad. But either way it's tricky to get it all lined up and to keep your camera shadow off the image. Does anyone who has done this already have any good suggestions to make concerning this or another method?

Thanks,
Stuart.

[Fred Smith]

I just recently discovered Songbook +. I guess I must have been living under a rock until now.😲

It took me all of 30 minutes to load all my existing Chordpro files into Songbook and convert them to pdf's. Linking them to the Genos with the Yamaha Bluetooth adapter and Pageflip pedal took only another 15 minutes. This software was well worth the asking price, just as everyone promised.

I now want to get existing sheet music into Songbook and am trying to photograph each page. So far I've found it better to use a digital camera, rather than the one in the iPad. But either way it's tricky to get it all lined up and to keep your camera shadow off the image. Does anyone who has done this already have any good suggestions to make concerning this or another method?

Can't help you with your specific issue, but if you had a scanner, it would be better to scan the sheets to a PDF. You'd get better quality that way.

Fred

[StuartR]

Can't help you with your specific issue, but if you had a scanner, it would be better to scan the sheets to a PDF. You'd get better quality that way.

Fred

I thought about scanning the pages. Wasn't sure whether my 600dpi scanner would give me that much better resolution than my high resolution camera. My real concern is getting the sheet music pages to lay down flat on the scanner surface. Guess I'll give it a try and see. Thanks!

[vinhbuidoi]

I have around 1400 songs in songbook+, about 1000 songs in JPG format. I like the JPG format because the size smaller than pdf. I use IPad to search for lyric of the song, then capture screen image, then use the Export option of the Songbook+ to import the file direct into the app.

[Robert van Weersch]

Stuart, a scanner will almost always get the best result. But if you want to use a smartphone or tablet, try using Microsoft's Office Lens. It is free and does an amazing job at capturing paper sheets with the camera.

[Pino]

SongBook is an excellent sheet viewer and has many editing features

I can only talk about the iPad Pro

The iPad Pro takes better photos than your normal scanner

Are you talking about individual sheet music or busker books?

You can download busker books and sheets from the internet and make a screenshot on iPad
Then do "photo to PDF in SongBook,

Vinhbuidol's post is spot on.  😀

[Bill]

Hi Stuart

I do not understand why you need to scan something in as a picture THEN need to convert it to PDF.

The IPAD is capable of Scanning directly as a PDF. There are many APPs that do this and correct the page deformations etc. They also automatically cutout the off page (background detail) clutter.  They also allow you to scan a complete tunes as one PDF file i.e.. if a tune has three pages in a score the scanner will allow you to scan ALL 3 pages into one file. This is far easier.
There is really no need to scan at a very high resolution, 300DPI is more than enough.

If you do not want to buy an additional APP you may already have one as the DROPBOX App has a built in scanner.

Bill

[PWB]

Just to throw another idea in. I am not an accomplished pianist so I copy the music into iwrite pro and then I can transpose into an easier key. I find that I can also condense most songs into a single page which eliminates page turning halfway through a song. Sure it takes longer but it is the only way that I can tackle some scores in ridiculously hard keys.   

[StuartR]

Hi Stuart

I do not understand why you need to scan something in as a picture THEN need to convert it to PDF.

The IPAD is capable of Scanning directly as a PDF. There are many APPs that do this and correct the page deformations etc. They also automatically cutout the off page (background detail) clutter.  They also allow you to scan a complete tunes as one PDF file i.e.. if a tune has three pages in a score the scanner will allow you to scan ALL 3 pages into one file. This is far easier.
There is really no need to scan at a very high resolution, 300DPI is more than enough.

If you do not want to buy an additional APP you may already have one as the DROPBOX App has a built in scanner.

Bill

Thanks Bill. Didn't know about the scan to PDF apps. I'll check them out.

*UPDATE* turns out I already had Adobe Scan on my phone but didn't realize its potential. What an idiot! Thanks for waking me up.

[StuartR]

Stuart, a scanner will almost always get the best result. But if you want to use a smartphone or tablet, try using Microsoft's Office Lens. It is free and does an amazing job at capturing paper sheets with the camera.

Thanks Robert. Never heard of Office Lens. I'll check that out.

[frozzers]

Stuart

I started off down your route and spent hours scanning to PDF then uploading to my Surface Pro (same principle as yours).

Then I saw this post about the Wikifonia song database:

https://www.psrtutorial.com/forum/index.php/topic,42091.msg332652.html#msg332652

Halfway down the post Jorgen provided a link to the database which I then downloaded. I was amazed at the volume and quality; many of the scores were in a much better state than those I'd scanned. So I felt like I'd wasted a lot of time and effort with the scanning.

If you download the database, it's worth spending some time looking through the list. There are many standards. The original database has them sorted on composer but someone later sorted them on title - see page 2 on the Synthzone associated link. I suggest that you download that one.

Note, the scores are in '.mxl' format. To convert them to PDF, I used MuseScore which is a great music notation program so, before you convert them, you can eg transpose the music or make any other adjustments as required.

Zionip (Paul) provided a fabulous conversion script routine (included in the above link) which made very short work of the conversion.

Cheers


Chris