Our PDF/image scanning feature, launched in beta in September, now supports lyrics!

When you upload a PDF or image, you’ll now see the lyrics in your slice. Our lyrics editor makes it fast and easy to tweak the text in case of misdetections, though in our experience the detection is good as long as the photo is reasonably clear.

We’ve trained our machine-learning system specifically to detect lyric syllables and run OCR (optical character recognition) on the individual letters. We took extra care to detect and preserve hyphens between syllables, and we should do the right thing for “extenders” (the horizontal lines that specify a syllable should be held over multiple notes).

For now, it only works for languages that use Latin characters, such as English.

We still consider our PDF/image scanning to be in beta, but this was one of our highest-priority features post-launch. This makes the tool extra useful for choral directors and people teaching/practicing vocal repertoire. Enjoy!