SharpEye

If you are skilled in music, then you can probably play a song in your head, without a sheet music. You may have an exam or a performance and you may need to know a particular song by heart. If staying up all night, reading staves and trying to figure out how a song should sound like is part of your routine, then you will definitely appreciate SharpEye and what it can do for you. If you have working scanner, you can actually listen to your sheet music. The software will scan the staves and convert them to playable music.

The program's installation file is roughly 1 and a half MB, which can be downloaded in less than a minute, with any type of Internet connection. The installation process is just as fast and it does not involve any difficult settings. The software is not free, but you can use its trial version, for a limited period of time, without any kind of restrictions or nag screens.

Essentially, SharpEye works like an OCR application. Instead of recognizing the letters, numbers or other symbols on a document, it recognizes the notes and all other symbols on musical staves. If it detects a note, in a certain position, the software will play a sound. If the note is higher or lower, it will play a different sound. Of course, SharpEye will take other symbols and measurements into account, making the entire melody as accurate as possible.

Using the application is not difficult. You may click a button, located on the toolbar, to scan your sheet music or you can select a different option to load an image. The image must be in TIFF format, with a high resolution, otherwise the application will not be able to detect the staves. The scanned or loaded image will show up on a separate window and you will have to select the staves, by drawing a rectangle around them. Clicking the "Read image" option, from the main interface, will load the musical staves, along with its elements, on the larger area of the window.

Once the staves are imported into the interface, you may hit a Play button and the software will play each note, using piano sounds. The best part is that you can edit the music score as well. You may change any note, by simply clicking and dragging it to a higher or lower position, insert new notes or symbols and more. The music can be saved as a MIDI file, a NIFF or music XML file or you can save it in the software's native format. SharpEye's functionality does not stop here. There are many more settings to make, for each output format, for music or text recognition and many more.