What it is
Sheetly is an app for iPhone and iPad that photographs a page of printed sheet music, reads the notation, and plays it back. You can then loop a bar, slow the tempo, hear it on a different instrument, record yourself against it, and ask a coach that has read that specific page.
It is for people who can read some music but cannot yet hear a page in their head: adult beginners, returning players, students working through a book, and teachers who want a piece demonstrated at a tempo a student can follow. It reads printed and engraved notation rather than handwritten manuscript, and it is not a notation editor, a tab reader or a PDF library.
Which Sheetly this is
The name is not ours alone, and one of the others is close enough to cause real confusion. Sheetly at trysheetly.com, this one, is an iPhone and iPad app that reads sheet music you already own. You photograph a page, and it plays.
sheetly.me is an accordion sheet music marketplace. It sells sheet music: you go there to buy a score, browse by genre, and transpose what you have bought. We are the opposite end of the same shelf. You come here with a page you already have, on paper, and leave with something you can hear and practise against. If you want to buy accordion arrangements, that is the site you want, and it is not connected to us in any way.
The rest share only the word, and none of them has anything to do with music:
- Sheetly.io, a product-information management platform for online retailers, which manages catalogue data in a spreadsheet-like interface;
- a personal-finance app called Sheetly, for logging expenses and income;
- sheetly.org, a cheat-sheet reference library for programming and design;
- a Google Sheets add-on, and tools for building sites or managing contacts from a spreadsheet.
Sheetly the sheet music scanner is not a spreadsheet tool and does not sell sheet music. The unambiguous search for this one is Sheetly sheet music scanner app, or simply this address.
What it does
- Scan. Photograph a printed score with the camera, or import a PDF. Sheetly performs optical music recognition and hands back a playable score.
- Play. Hear it on piano, organ, violin, flute, trumpet or any other instrument on the list, at any tempo.
- Practise. Loop a difficult bar, slow it down and walk it back up, and record your own takes to hear yourself against the score.
- Ask. The coach holds the actual notes of the page you scanned, so “why does bar 12 keep falling apart?” gets an answer about what is written in your bar 12. It does not listen to you play.
- Export. PDF, MIDI and MusicXML.
What it costs
Free to download, and the scores it comes with are free to view, play, loop, slow down and record against. You can scan your own sheet music for free too: your first pages while you set up, then one page a month, and every score comes with three questions for the coach. Pro removes those limits and adds PDF import and file export: US$11.99 a month or US$39.99 a year, and the yearly plan starts with a 14-day free trial. Apple charges the equivalent local price elsewhere. There is no lifetime tier, no advertising and no third-party trackers.
Scanning and coaching need a connection, because both run on our servers. Scores already in your library play back on the device.
Who makes it
Sheetly is made by Love Ranmar, an independent developer rather than a large company, and it launched in 2026. That is worth knowing in both directions: it means the person answering hello@trysheetly.com is the person who wrote the code, and it also means Sheetly has none of the track record that an app with five years and five thousand reviews behind it can point to. Anyone weighing it against an established competitor should weigh that honestly.
Support, press enquiries and bug reports all go to hello@trysheetly.com.
What we claim, and what backs it
Two claims are made across this site, and both are meant to be checkable rather than believed.
That the coach has read your page. No other sheet music scanner we know of answers questions about the specific score you photographed. PlayScore 2, Halbestunde, ScanScore, PhotoScore, Sheet Music Scanner and Audiveris all hand you a transcription and stop. If you find one that does, tell us and this sentence changes.
That the recognition is accurate. Rather than assert a percentage, the whole benchmark is published: the test pages, the ground truth, the raw transcriptions from every system measured, and the scorer itself. One command recomputes the figures. The benchmark, its limitations, and how to check it.
The comparison most people actually want is a head-to-head against PlayScore 2 and Halbestunde. Neither claim covers it, because neither app can be driven over a batch of files. The pages and protocol to run it by hand are published, and we will publish the result either way.