Importing from PDFs and photos

Soundslice lets you import PDFs and photos of sheet music, using a type of technology called Optical Music Recognition.

Our system extracts all of the musical information — the notes, pitches, rhythms, etc. — and makes it interactive, so that you can play back, edit, sync with audio/video and more.

This import feature is in beta. That means we’re still actively working on it and improving its capabilities, but it’s good enough for people to start using.

Importing a PDF or photos

In your slice manager, click “New slice” and choose the “Start with a scanned image” option:

You’ll see a simple page where you can choose a file from your computer/device for scanning.

If you’ve chosen a PDF file, we’ll show you all of the pages of the file, and you’ll be able to select which pages to include:

If you’re working with photos, you’ll be able to select multiple photos from your device. Make sure to select them in the right order musically — starting with the beginning of the music, etc.

When you’ve made your selections, click “Upload” and our system will get to work.

It can take a few minutes to process the upload, depending on the nature of your music. You can see all your pending uploads in the “Pending image uploads” section at the top of your slice manager:

When our system is done, you’ll get an email notification with a link. We’ll also update the “Pending image uploads” section to say “Ready for your review.”

The review process

After your upload is done processing and you click the link to view it, you’ll be taken to the review screen. Here, our system might ask you a few questions about the music — things like “Does this notehead have a sharp sign in front of it?”

The number of questions depends on the quality of your scan and the complexity of your music. In some cases there might be many, but in other cases there might be few or none at all. Our system learns from the music it has seen, and it will ask fewer and fewer questions over time.

Note: It’s possible that our system will decide not to ask you any questions. Nice! In this case, you’ll be taken directly to the results.

The results page

After you’ve completed the review process, you’ll see the results page. It looks like this:

On the top, you’ll see the music displayed by our own graphics engine. On the bottom, you’ll see the original image(s). This lets you quickly see how our system did.

You can press Play (or press Spacebar) to hear the music played back. You can also click on any area of the notation (in either the top or bottom panes) to move to that moment in the music.

When you’re ready, click the Continue button at upper right:

The options here are:

• Practice — loads the music in our player so you can begin learning and practicing.
• Edit — loads the music in our editor so you can make changes.
• Redo import — lets you change the import settings.

Making fixes and edits

There are two ways to make fixes and edits to your PDF/image uploads:

1. Change the importer settings and reprocess. See our separate help page.
2. Use our notation editor. See our help section on editing.

For any slice that’s been created via our PDF/image importer, our editor will give you a special feature — you’ll see your original upload in the bottom half of the screen:

This lets you cross-reference between the generated slice and your original images, to spot-check for any errors or omissions. You can toggle the display of the original images by clicking “Scanned image” at the bottom right of the screen.

Tips for successful imports

Our system is powered by sophisticated artificial intelligence algorithms, so it can deal with lots of “cruft” on your scan or photo — much more so than other music-scanning software, in our experience. With that said, here are some guidelines on how to ensure high-quality imports:

• Use typeset music. Our system doesn’t work with handwritten music yet — maybe someday!
• Keep the outer edges of the notation visible. Make sure the notation isn’t cut off.
• Make things relatively straight. We can deal with wavy and slanted images, but at least make an effort to make the staff lines reasonably level.
• Use decent lighting. We can deal with poorly lit images, but brighter/clearer photos will make our system happier.
• Use decent resolution. We can deal with low-res images, but higher resolution will get you better results.

Supported file types

We currently support the following:

• PDF documents
• BMP images
• GIF images
• HEIC images
• JPG images
• PNG images
• TIFF images
• WEBP images

Supported notations

Our system doesn’t yet detect every single type of music notation. In the vast majority of cases, you can use our editor to add any notations that weren’t detected.

For more information on supported notations, see our separate help page.

Usage limits

Uploading PDFs and photos is still in beta, and we’ve placed limits on its usage. They are as follows:

• You can only upload one PDF (or set of images) at a time. Once you’ve uploaded, you won’t be able to upload again until it’s processed and you’ve completed the review process.
• There’s a monthly quota on uploads. This quota depends on which plan you’re in. Please see this page for the current limits. The quota resets on the first of the month, regardless of when you signed up for a paid plan.
• We only process 25 pages at a time. You can select the pages to process. For the Free plan, the limit is 1 page per PDF and only the first 32 bars within that page (but, hey, it’s free).

We’ll probably increase these limits as the system matures. If you’re in a special situation requiring a significantly higher limit, please get in touch.

What kind of PDFs does this support?

Any PDF of sheet music should work, regardless of which program generated it. It doesn’t matter if it was generated by a notation program or not. It’s totally fine to use PDFs in which the notation images are scans or photographs.

I don’t have a PDF, I only have individual photos of music. How can I import multiple photos together as one?

No problem! You can select multiple images when uploading. Just make sure to select them in the right order. We’ll process them together, in the order you specified, resulting in a single slice.