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Alain Lumbroso, clarinetist (France) - "Pizzicato and SharpEye2 are for me both essential tools for our activity."
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Scan and modify your music

With SharpEye, you can scan your music and transfer it in Pizzicato to modify it, transpose it, listen to it, arrange it or print it.

You may download the SharpEye software at:

http://www.visiv.co.uk/installsharpeye2.exe

Once installed, this software may be used freely during one month. You can test it even with Pizzicato demo, scan your music and import it in Pizzicato.

SharpEye only works on Windows. For Mac users, there is another software, of which a Mac OS X is expected soon. See the editor's site at:

http://www.musitek.com

The various steps

If you do not possess Pizzicato yet, download the demo version 3 at www.arpegemusic.com/demo1.htm and install the software by double-clicking on the downloaded file.

Download SharpEye at http://www.visiv.co.uk/installsharpeye2.exe and install that software by double-clicking on the downloaded file. Press 5 times on the "Next" button, then click on "Finish".

With your scanner, scan a music score of one page for your first test. Scan it in black and white, in TIFF or BMP file format. To have a correct result, the original score must be of good quality. A handwritten score will not produce good results. The lines of the staves must be clearly visible in the scanned music sheet.

Start SharpEye (Start, Programs, Visiv, SharpEye 2).

Select article "Open image..." from the "File" menu and select the previously scanned music sheet (Tiff or Bmp file format).

Select article "Read" from the "Read" menu. The conversion begins. A percentage shows the progression of the work, in the low part of the window. Wait until the score appears in the main window.

In the "Options" menu, select article "NIFF Options...", check "Graphical" and validate.

Select article "NIFF... Save" from the "File" menu and give a name to your score (with the NIF extension).

Start Pizzicato (Start, Programs, Pizzicato 3, Pizzicato). At startup, select the Professional demo mode if you do not have a license yet.

In the "File" menu, select "Import a NIFF file..." and select the NIF file previously saved. Only Pizzicato Professional 3 has that function.

Validate the dialog box that appears and your score is displayed. You can listen to it with the little yellow triangle button, in the tool bar of the window.

The above procedure explains the main points. The quality of recognition of music symbols may not be perfect and according to the complexity of the score, there will be some little errors to correct. But in general, the time saved as opposed to writing all the notes yourself is quite important.

For more information, see the Pizzicato lesson on using NIFF files at http://www.arpegemusic.com/manual30/EN561.htm

NIFF or MIDI files ?

Only Pizzicato Professional 3 imports NIFF files. Those files contain not only the notes, but also several symbols and the page setup of the original score.

If you use Pizzicato Pro 2 or Beginner 2 or 3, you may however also import scanned sheets of music from SharpEye (or SmartScore), but you must then use a MIDI file to do the transfer. The MIDI file contains all the notes but not the way in which the measures are assembled in a page. Use the same procedure as above, but replace NIFF by MIDI. The time saved is still an advantage, because the notes are written.

Summary

With the combination of SharpEye (or SmartScore) and Pizzicato, you may scan your sheets of music, modify them and listen to them.

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