Capella Scan 7
Gaspard Xenos
Capella-scan has put an end to the laborious task of typing out notes! At last, there is now a way of transposing printed notes and creating part extraction from a printed score without having to type out sheet music note-for-note.By opening the scanned file in capella notation software (available separately), you can print the file to your specifications.
Capella-scan is a professional note recognition tool to help you digitize your printed music scores. You can either use your scanner or open an already existing image file (TIFF, BMP, PDF, and others), and the program will accurately recognize all the elements that conform the score, including multiple voices, accidentals, cue notes, grace notes, ties, slurs, and many more.
This program owes its outstanding recognition capabilities to Tesseract 4 OCR engine, which Capella-scan uses not only for note recognition, but also to detect even the smallest and more complex features you can find in sheet music, such as brackets, curly braces, dynamics, keys, crescendo and articulation signs, etc. Complex scores with multiple voices, lyrics, etc., are easily digitized with Capella-scan. With its more than 100 different dictionaries, it is capable of recognizing and double-checking almost any kind of text. Capella-scan also includes a convenient MIDI functionality that will allow you to listen to any fragment or to a full score. You can configure Windows MIDI mapper to play your score using any of the 127 different instruments and sound effects available.
One of the beauties of this tool is the possibility of having both the original score and the OCR results in the same window, displaying one on top of the other. This useful feature highly simplifies the editing process, minimizing the time you usually spend correcting notation mistakes. Additionally, it may work as a conventional music editing program, allowing you to insert any note or sign that was left out during the scanning process or that was missing from the original score. For further editing, printing, and enhancing tasks, the program can save your scores into Capella, CapXML, MIDI, or MusicXML files that you can then use with other professional tools like Finale, Sibelius, or Encore.
Let capella-scan transform your sheet music quickly into a ringing score that is ready for editing and printing! capella-scan has put an end to the laborious task of typing out notes. At last, there is now a way of transposing printed notes and creating part extraction from a printed score without having to type out sheet music note-for-note.
capella-scan is the perfect addition to capella or your music notation program. capella-scan converts your printed music sheets into a capella or MusicXML file. Edit this file in capella or your preferred music notation program according to your ideas.
You already have the sheet music of a work that you want to practice or play, but you can't use it as is. Something has to be transposed, rearranged, simplified, changed, shortened, supplemented or edited in some other way. Maybe you just need one part from a score. Perhaps you want to combine several parts into one score. In all of these cases, you could type the music with your music notation program before further processing - or better yet, scan it with capella-scan.
By opening the scanned file in capella notation software (available separately), you can print the file to your specifications. You will find that all the notation program's score editing functions are available for editing your new file. You can, of course, also produce part extraction or change the notes yourself - there are no editing restrictions whatsoever.
Music recognition programs have to work very hard when several voices appear in a single line. In actual fact, this is the point where many of the other programs on the market reach their limitations. Yet capella-scan has been developed to accomplish its task even when faced with these difficult situations. Drawing on its excellent voice management system, capella-scan analyses and establishes the right connections and assigns all notes to their correct vertical and horizontal positions.
capella-scan contains a module for text recognition, so that lyrics, headings, footnotes and other text objects are recognized at the same time. Dictionaries in various languages are used in the background to check whether what is recognized is plausible.
capella-scan can recognize pitch and pitch length, rests, accidentals, keys, key signature and time signature. It also recognizes brackets and curly braces, distances between staves, slurs, ties, repeat boxes, articulation signs, staff size, cue notes and much more. Note recognition is a very demanding process that requires software to accomplish something that in principle is only possible with human experience. When is an undefined mark on the music sheet a note, an eighth rest or simply a smudge?
Capella-scan is a sophisticated optical music recognition (OMR) software that uses advanced algorithms to analyze and convert printed or handwritten sheet music into editable digital formats. Whether you have a pile of sheet music that needs to be preserved digitally or wish to modify existing scores, Capella-scan offers a comprehensive solution that saves time and effort while maintaining the integrity of the original musical composition.
If you already have Capella-Scan 7 or 8 (also scan&play), you can upgrade to the version 9 at a special upgrade price during the introductory promotion. You can find your personal upgrade offer in your customer account.
capella is a musical notation program or scorewriter developed by the German company Capella Software AG (formerly WHC), running on Microsoft Windows[3] or corresponding emulators in other operating systems, like Wine on Linux[4] and others on Apple Macintosh. Capella requires to be activated after a trial period of 30 days. The publisher writes the name in lower case letters only. The program was initially created by Hartmut Ring, and is now maintained and developed by Bernd Jungmann.
Capella is one of the earliest computer programs for music notation and has a relatively moderate price compared with Finale or Sibelius, though up to version 7 it ran only on Windows. Capella claims to have 300,000 users for the music notation program and 120,000 for the OCR program. Digital sheet music in capella formats is available in various online music libraries, especially in German speaking areas. The German Protestant hymnal Evangelisches Gesangbuch has been digitized using capella software.
The current version is Capella Professional 8.0, which includes guitar chord notation ability, and guitar tab writing functions, in addition to the standard music notation tools. A capella start program is offered with several restrictions for a lower price. A free capella reader can display, print and play a capella score.
capella can play back the score (the full score or an arbitrary selection of staves) via the computer's sound card, to MIDI devices or using VST modules. capella's captune module allows to select the output channels and to fine-tune the sounds.
The file format of capella evolved from a proprietary digital encoding (filename extension *.cap) to an open, XML text based format called CapXML with extension *.capx. There are CapXML 1.0 and 2.0 formats. Each *.capx file is a ZIP archive containing the actual XML with filename score.xml. CapXML differs from MusicXML in various aspects, one being that in CapXML the basic node is the chord which can have one or more notes, whereas in MusicXML the notes of a chord are single nodes which have to be put into relation with one another.[5] Capella can import and export MusicXML files.
Capella provides a programming interface for Python scripts with a set of Python-classes providing the capella object hierarchy. Python scripts can be used as a plug-in to the capella program or run stand-alone, i.e. within a Capella editing session or externally, directly on the file or group of files. CapXML scores can, of course, be directly processed by any XML-aware software.
Companion products to capella provide Music OCR (Capella Scan, which uses the FineReader engine from the Russian company ABBYY to recognize text, including Gothic letters), music recognition out of audio files (Capella Wave Kit), music teaching and training (rondo, audite!), composition aids (tonica fugata, with automatic composition of polyphonic sets, canons, and fugues), and production of accompaniment music files or CDs for karaoke-like uses for amateurs and professionals (Capella Playalong).
The first version was published in 1992 as a program named "Allegro", running under MS-DOS with its own graphical interface. Since the name was already taken, the name had to be changed - taking the name from the brightest star in the constellation Auriga, Capella. Only the original file name extension ALL was kept for the binary notation file format. The first real capella is version 1.01 dated 15 May 1992. Version 1.5 was the last MS-DOS Version, published in 1993.
The company was originally called "whc Musiksoftware", then "whc Musiksoftware GmbH". The name was changed to "capella-software GmbH" in the fall of 2002, changing the legal form from GmbH to AG (Aktiengesellschaft) in March 2011.
Which one is best is really an "it depends" type of answer. It depends on the repertoire you are scanning and your work style preferences. All of these programs have demos, so the best approach is to download the demos and see how well they work with your music. All the programs should work fine of relatively simple music, and have more trouble as the music gets more complex - particularly with counterpoint on a single staff, as in keyboard music.
You will probably find it easiest to use the scanner to do the scanning, and then edit things further for an MP3 in another program. All four products export MusicXML files so you can easily use the results with other programs. PhotoScore has special export to Sibelius and capella-scan has special export to capella, in addition to the MusicXML export.
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