The blonde woman has a cousin that is an excellent pianist. She has boxes of sheet music she has accumulated over the years of playing, for churches, weddings and assorted private events. Is there a device or app that would allow her to scan, organize and access the library digitally rather than searching through a multitude of boxes?
MusicReader.net might be a good option. I don't have personal experience with it, but here's some info. An overview of the features: Stand alone apps - no internet needed for rehearsals and performances. Syncing power of cloud services, easily use multiple devices with same music. Fully PDF based viewer + easy conversion of other formats. Scanning of paper sheet music Convenient library storing all your music Easy and hands free page turning Foot pedal, touchscreen and timer Flexible annotation making, including support for pen Integrated recorder / player, metronome & tuner Half page view for sight impaired musicians
It's probably going to be a lot of work no matter what method she ends up using. The hard part is going to be scanning the sheets. Much sheet music is going to be multiple pages per title, so it's probably best to save the entire library (for consistency) as scanned PDFs. When each PDF is complete, simply naming the file appropriately would go a long way towards having a "database" that is searchable. A scanner with a document feeder would be hugely beneficial. Unfortunately some music will not be compatible with a document feeder. As a labor saving tactic I'd be tempted to separate the music into these categories: Songs on a single side of a sheet of paper Songs on both sides of a single sheet of paper Songs on single sided paper for multiple sheets Songs on both sides of paper for multiple sheets Songs in "book" format The first two types can be scanned efficiently using a document feeder provided they are on roughly the same size paper. Just let the scanning software generate a name for each one, then go back after the fact through the files, previewing them one at a time and changing the file name to the title of the song. The next two types will have to be done individually per song, but a document feeder can still expedite the task. Place the sheets for a song on the document feeder, generate a PDF from all the pages, then name the output file appropriately. The last group will be the orneriest because you have to open the pages in order and set them on the scanner glass to scan them into a PDF. When each is complete, give the PDF an appropriate name. There may be some OCR software that could expedite this process, but a quick Google search didn't pop up anything obvious. Yes, the software can probably fish the title out of the music, but you'd still end up having to copy/paste the text into a file name to complete the process.
All great info about process and what even an organized file system could do once digitized. One additional process that could be set up for anything is a digital camera with a tripod or mount you could shoot down and adjust height, then use glass to lay the sheets flat. Pretty manual process so can rip through once you're set up. Then run through and rename files - or just shoot in batches and dump into appropriate folder for organization.
So I came across these today and diverted them from a one way trip to the landfill because I remembered that someone on here was asking about sheet music awhile back. I suppose that this might be counter to the reason why you posted this thread in the first place, but if the blonde woman’s cousin would like this stack of sheet music from the 30s and 40s, please let me know and tell me where to send them. There's gotta be a hundred or more. It's about a 2 inch thick stack.
