Open source Optical Music Recognition software for Mac OS X

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It would be my luck an arrangement I made of the aria "Amor ti vieta" from Giordano's opera "Fedora" (essentially replacing the lyrics with the text of the "Agnus Dei") disappeared without a trace from my Mac. Right now my right wrist is screaming bloody murder with pain, so copying the score from the PDF of the piano vocal score I downloaded from Petrucci-IMSLP is out of the question. I do have Myriad's Harmony Assistant, as well as their OMER and PDF2music apps.(Not the Pro version of PDF2music, which will do what I want it to do, but I don't have the $200.00 for a license.). Does anyone know of any open source application that will do this. I do know of one application, but it only has source code for Windows and Linux, and requires JRE in order to do the build. I've already tried to build it on Mavericks but blows up when starting the build from it's web page.

I don't even understand the question, but I'm sorry you're in pain and you lost your work. I hope you figure it out!

I did finally figure out what was going on with my issue with Optical Music Recognition.

I was looking at an open source application called Audiveris. (Http://Audiveris.kenai.com). Unlike the normal compile and run using make scripts under Linux and Mac OS X, the owner of the project decided he was going to use Java from Oracle (yech!) as his base in order to keep everything on a single code base. The problem is, Audiveris also requires Tesseract as part of it's OCR engine. While Tesseract is available for Windows and Linux, it does not play well with Mac OS X. Given that, I decided to boot into Windows 7, and try to install Audiveris from the launch button on the web page.

Unfortunately, Audiveris is not smart enough to figure out whether one is using either the 32 or 64 bit version of Windows. Even though I have both the 32 and the 64 bit versions of Java 7 installed, it still compiled Tesseract as 32 bit, thereby causing innumerable headaches when the program launches, but throws errors loading any libraries.

Failing to get anything done using Windows 7 64-bit, I try my luck with Ubuntu 10, as well as Linux Mint 14. Both versions are 64-bit and have an OpenJava runtime environment installed. Only problem is, Audiveris requires Oracle (yech!) Java in order to run. Installing Oracle (yech!) Java is a pain in the arse in both Operating systems.

I ended up installing Audiveris in Windows XP 32 bit, which I had installed under Parallels 9. I also had to install Oracle (yech!) Java 7 update 50, since the installation launcher refuses to run under Oracle (yech!) Java 6, nor will it work under Oracle (yech!) Java 8 update 5. I was then able to load a .pdf file of music I wanted to arrange and export it as a MusicXML 3.0 file.

As I feared, when I tried to load the XML file into Harmony Assistant, as well as Finale NotePad 2012 for Mac OS X, I ran into all sorts of garbage and had to do extensive editing in order to make everything look readable. When I tried to load the same file into MuseScore for the Mac, MuseScore would just quit. Turns out these programs can't handle MusicXML 3.0 format. If I had Roughly $500.00 for the current version of Sibelius or the $400.00 for Finale 2014, I'd be using them instead of Harmony Assistant. The only Open Souce notation program I haven't relied is LilyPad, which I have had difficulty with in the past, and am somewhat reluctant to try using now, as it really doesn't play well with Mac OS X.

So much for trying to save my aching right wrist, in which Carpal Tunnel is manakins 3 of my fingers on my right hand curl under, a ls Leon Fleischer.

That sounds like quite a mess. You seem like you really know a lot about computers.

I have the current version of Sibelius - if the XML files is something you can PM or link on a file sharing site so I can grab it, and let me know what you want done with it - I'll give it a try.

Thanks, but i already reentered the piece manually in Harmony Assistant (my right wrist is telling me about it.)

Earlier yesterday, after I got home again without a different car (my 95 Saturn SL 1 is going through 3-5 quarts of oil a week, the transmission is starting to slip pretty badly, and I had a fire break out under the dashboard ), and again started experimenting with optical music recognition software. This time, I was back with a not-so-friendly friend from my past as a Windoze user, Musitek's Smart Score X2. I downloaded a copy of the latest demo version for Mac OS X. I started the program and had it read a pdf copy of Gounoud's Repentir (aka O divine Redeemer). I was expecting to get the same garbage I get trying to load pdf music into OmeR or PDF pro from Myriad Software. Imagine my surprise when it read the file and was able to recognize and playback the music perfectly. Unfortunately, the demo version does not allow you save the results or even allow you to export to MIDI, NIFF, or MusicXML. I did find a cracked older version of MuseScore on a BitTorrent site. I deleted the Demo version, Installed the cracked full version to see how well it would export. I imported the Gounod Repentir into this older version of Smartscore, had it read and recognize the score, then exported the results in MusicXML. I loaded the XML into Harmony Assistant. With a misassignment of MIDI channels (channels 2 and 3 ended up being assigned voice instead of piano), and some minor screw ups in rendering a few bars in the piece, the conversion from MusicXML was pretty flawless. There were a few accidentals that got screwed up can be easily fixed. I'm more than impressed, since the last time I used MuseScore, it sh*t all over itself.

The only bad thing about this program: the price! The full professional version (which will handle anything you throw at it) is $399. There are other versions of MuseScore for piano and voice, piano only, and guitar at lesser prices, but they are a lot less flexible than the professional version.

I did see Musitek has versions for iOS and Android for free, but are unable to save out the files to NIFF or MusicXML. The deluxe version are available for $10.00, which will give you a substantial discount on the desktop versions. This should be interesting, especially when one Carpal Tunnel starts acting up when attempting to manually enter scores via mouse.