Denemo tries to provide a gui frontend like Finale, Sibelius and Musescore but combine that with the superior engraving capabilities of Lilypond.įrescobaldi is a text editor built for Lilypond that has a built-in previewer and does all the kinds of things (syntax highlighting, etc) you'd expect from a developers environment and then adds all sorts of user friendly things like wizards and templates.ĭenemo is a far more ambitious project which means it also is going to move slower, in general. I regret having paid US $200 for it.The programs take very different - opposite, even - approaches.
I would not waste my time with PDFtoMusic Pro if I were you.
I have never found a single score that PDFtoMusic Pro could handle anywhere near as well as PhotoScore could. PDFtoMusic Pro does a very poor job at what it is designed to do, and produces a great deal of errors and baffling glitches. I have owned PDFtoMusicPro for several years, through several updates, and I must say that it has always been inferior to PhotoScore Ultimate. Its output is MusicXML, and it has no features integrating it with Sibelius per se.
There is a competing product called PDFtoMusic Pro made by Myriad Software which can only handle the latter case - a PDF made directly from a music scoring program without going through paper and scanning. It can also work with a PDF which was generated directly from a music scoring program without going through paper and scanning (often with very good results). PhotoScore can use OCR to scan any printed paper score which has been put on a scanner and made into a bitmapped PDF (with variable results depending on the quality of the engraving and the quality of the scanned image). Then you can buy PhotoScore Ultimate for US $250 if you think it is worth it. But you can try it out on what you have and see if you can get the hang of it. Sibelius comes bundled with a "lite" version of PhotoScore which is limited in its capabilities and can only scan simple scores. But it costs money, and it will only be worth your while if you have a lot of scores to convert on a regular basis. But first-time users of PhotoScore tend to be disappointed because they have unreasonable expectations about how it works. I have been doing this for years and I am good at it. One needs to develop some skill in using the process, finding the errors, and correcting them.
The PhotoScore process is never perfect, and anything done with PhotoScore will require careful editing to correct inaccuracies in reading the images. In this workflow, MusicXML is an optional extra step.) (PhotoScore can output MusicXML, and Sibelius can input and output MusicXML, but with PhotoScore you can output directly to Sibelius, which works better. The output from PhotoScore is then sent to Sibelius, where you can edit it further. I have had success by using an elaborate (and expensive) workaround: Take PDF scores created by Lilypond, or any other engraving program, and run them through music optical character recognition (OCR) using the commercial program Neuratron PhotoScore Ultimate.
Your goal is to get from Lilypond to Sibelius.