Instrument assignment in PDF scans

When doing a PDF/image scan, you can use our instrument assignment tool to provide information about the instruments in your music — resulting in better scan results.

Specifically, you can:

• Specify which instrument goes with which staff, in case the automatic assignment was incorrect
• Specify each instrument’s name
• Specify instrument transposition (for non-concert-pitch instruments)

Opening the instrument assignment tool

This tool is available after scans are complete. After you do a scan, we’ll take you to the results page, which looks like this:

At the top of the page, click “Instruments…” to open the instrument assignment tool

If you’ve already exited the results page (for example, you’ve gone into our editor or player), open your slice in edit mode and click the “Reprocess” button. You’ll find that button over the image of your original scan, in the bottom half of the editor screen.

Using the instrument assignment tool

When you click “Instruments…” to start using this tool, a few things will happen:

• The original scanned image will take up your whole screen (we’ll hide the Soundslice version of the music).
• Each detected staff will be colored and labeled. Staves associated with the same instrument will use the same color — so you can quickly check that the staves are “linked” properly.

Click any staff to open an information panel:

In this panel, you’ll see the instrument (i.e., “part”) linked to this staff. If you’d like to make a change, click in the drop-down menu and choose another one of the detected instruments.

Click “Edit instrument name and transposition” to display some extra options:

Here, you can rename the part. By default we use “Track X” (where X is the sequential number of the part within your score). In some cases we’ll also detect the part name from a label in the original image.

You can also change the instrument transposition. You’d use this, for example, if your music is intended for a B♭ clarinet.

Saving changes

When you’re done making instrument-assignment changes, click “Save instruments” at upper right. Your slice will be regenerated with the changes taken into account — hence overriding any manual notation changes you may have made in our editor.

You can also click “Cancel” to discard the changes you’ve made.

Notes on piano music with multiple staves

Working with piano music that has two staves? For the purposes of our scanning system, these are treated as two separate parts.

So if you’re changing the instrument assignment for those staves, keep that in mind. The top staff should always use one part, and the bottom staff should always use another part (with a different color). It should end up looking something like this: