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Comment by ShadowBanThis01 | Hacker News Reader

What I'd love to do is use OCR on a bunch of these and be able to freely use the pieces by rendering them with MIDI. There are pieces I want to use in my short films or whatever, but all the recordings are copyrighted even if the music is now public-domain.

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Music OCR is in general in a pretty terrible state these days (I’ve tried most of the options on the market). I’ve heard good things about soundslice[1] though, but I haven’t had the occasion to try it yet.

[1]: https://www.soundslice.com/sheet-music-scanner/

Hello, I lead the creation of the Soundslice music scanning tool! My biased opinion is that we get much better results than other tools, even though it's still in beta and doesn't support the full range of notations we aim to support.

We're using machine learning instead of old-school image processing techniques (which are fast but can be very brittle).

Thanks, but ugh: It's Web-based.

A lot goes into a specific recorded performance, I think it's unrealistic to expect a film-worthy performance out of a MIDI renderer.

Sure, but for little indie projects I think it would suffice. And there are some great string libraries out there.

Unrealistic is an understatement, to be honest...

Would sound pretty boring OCRd but I wonder if a trained ML model could do a decent job of score -> expressive midi (2.0) performance

You'd have an easier time grabbing pieces with Lilypond engraving files available and converting those to MIDI: https://lilypond.org/doc/v2.23/Documentation/notation/creati...

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