Overview of the existing music development tools

[adriatic]

1. PlayScore

PlayScore takes traditional music scanning to the next level. Using the latest techniques in Optical Music Recognition (OCR for music), PlayScore plays music as it should sound, naturally and smoothly.

PlayScore uses ReadScoreLib – Optical Score Recognition cross platform library for converting multi-page printed musical score images to MIDI and MusicXML. ReadScoreLib processes a typical page of music in a few seconds on the iPad, less on a modern Mac or PC.

This PDF document describes the OMR library with more technical details

[adriatic]

I fetched the PlayScore lite (free version) to verify this app's function - and got blown away:

It literally took seconds before I heard the playing - and playing was perfect. Mindboggling!

[adriatic]

2. Sibelius

Sibelius is a scorewriter program developed and released by Sibelius Software Limited (now part of Avid Technology). It is the world's largest selling music notation program. Beyond creating, editing and printing music scores, Sibelius can also play the music back using sampled or synthesised sounds. It produces printed scores, and can also publish them via the Internet for others to access. Less advanced versions of Sibelius at lower prices have been released, as have various add-ons for the software.

[adriatic]

3. many open source applications

Aria Maestosa
Gregorio
Mozart the music processor - proprietary