Guides

everything we have written,
in one place.

How scanning works, what to do once the page plays, how Sheetly compares to everything else, and straight answers to the questions people ask their assistants.

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How to scan sheet music Photograph a printed score with your phone and hear it played back. The step-by-step flow, six habits for a clean read, … Is there an app that plays sheet music from a photo? Yes. Sheetly (iPhone, iPad) and PlayScore 2 (iOS, Android) photograph a printed page and play it back. How it works in f… The 118 symbols Sheetly reads Every mark the scanner reads, counted conservatively, from clefs to coda signs, and the honest list of what it cannot read yet. How to read sheet music A plain-English guide to reading sheet music: the staff, clefs, note names, rhythm values, time and key signatures, dyna… For adult beginners For adult beginners and returning players working through a book: how to close the gap between reading a page and hearin… A player for practice An app that plays sheet music: photograph the page, press play, and practise with loops, tempo control, instruments, tak…

See it in action

Short, picture-led pages: real binder photos, what the scanner made of them, and the practice tools in use.

A playhead you can feel, and a feature we deleted Why the playhead ticks once per note under your finger, why a smoother glide was reverted, and why a finished f… A crumpled trombone part, a ring binder, and a phone A real trombone part photographed in a ring binder, the staves Sheetly found on the crumpled page, and the playable scor… Six pages from a school band book Six real phone photos from a Swedish school band trombone part book: film music, Beethoven, a chorale, a beginner's tune… Loop one bar until it stops falling apart Why starting from bar 1 practises the wrong thing, how Loop works in the Sheetly player, and a five-clean-reps routine f… Slow it down. Then walk it back up. How to use the tempo control in Sheetly: why slow, correct playback beats a metronome, and a 60-72-84-written-tempo ladd… Record a take, then hear yourself against the score The Record button in Sheetly: what a take is, why listening back a day later is brutal and useful, and a one-take-per-se… Ask Sheetly about bar twelve Ask Sheetly answers by bar number because it has the notes of the score you scanned. One real exchange, explained. Hear your trombone part on a clarinet (and why you would) The Playback instrument sheet in Sheetly: piano, organ, strings, woodwinds, brass and more, and three reasons to swap.

By instrument

All 25 instruments Every instrument Sheetly supports, what supported means, and a guide for each. Piano Photograph a page of piano music and hear both hands play back. Why the grand staff is the hard case for scanners, how t… Violin and other single-line parts Photograph a violin part and hear it played back at any tempo. Why single-line parts are the easiest case for a sheet mu… Guitar What a sheet music scanner can and cannot do for guitarists. Sheetly reads standard notation and plays it back. It does… Choir Photograph a choral score and hear it played back, the whole choir or just your line. How scanners handle SATB scores, … Handwritten music Sheetly and the other mainstream sheet music scanners read printed notation, not handwriting. Why handwritten music is a…

Reading notation

How to read ledger lines Counting the lines above and below the staff, the C landmarks, and the misreads that catch everyone. How to read bass clef The F line, the mnemonics, how it relates to treble, and why left-hand, cello and trombone parts live here. How to read key signatures The order of sharps and flats, finding the key in two seconds, relative minors, and the forgotten F sharp. Dotted notes and ties Dot maths, ties versus slurs, and counting the dotted-quaver rhythm that trips up every beginner. How to read 6/8 time Two big beats of three, not six small ones. How compound time is counted and why it feels the way it does. How to read triplets Three in the time of two: counting them evenly, and the rushing mistake. Transposing instruments explained Why a B flat trumpet part sounds wrong on the piano, which way to transpose, and how to hear the part as written. Sheet music symbols explained Dynamics, articulation, repeats, D.C. and D.S., 8va, trills and tempo words, each with what it sounds like.

Getting files out

Sheet music to MIDI Turn a photo or PDF of printed sheet music into MIDI or MusicXML. What the two formats actually keep, how the conversion… PDF to MusicXML How to convert a sheet music PDF into MusicXML you can open in MuseScore, Sibelius, Dorico or Finale: import, recognise,…

The coach

Is there an app where you can ask an AI how to play a specific note or bar? Yes. Sheetly photographs your printed page, plays it, and its coach answers questions about a specific note or bar: fing… A sheet music app with an AI coach that has read your score Sheetly is a sheet music app whose AI coach receives the actual notes of the page you photographed, so it answers about … Apps where you can ask an AI about your sheet music (2026) Three kinds of “AI” in music apps: lesson apps that listen to you, chatbots you paste a question into, and Sheetly, whic… AI piano teacher apps: which kind do you actually want? (2026) There are two kinds of AI piano teacher app: ones that listen to you play from their own library (Simply Piano, Flowkey,…

Comparisons

Best sheet music scanner apps Sheetly, PlayScore 2, ScanScore, PhotoScore, Audiveris and more: what each one is actually for, published benchmark num… Best sheet music reader app forScore if you want PDFs on a stand; Sheetly if you want the app to read your own printed page, play it and answer questions about it by bar number. Sheetly vs PlayScore 2 Sheetly and PlayScore 2 both photograph sheet music and play it back. PlayScore is faster, offline and on Android; Sheet… Sheetly vs Halbestunde Halbestunde is mature, on Android and web, and advertises 99% accuracy without a method. Sheetly publishes its benchmark and has a coach that has read your page. Sheetly vs Soundslice Soundslice is the deeper web platform: editor, video sync, teaching. Sheetly is the phone-first way to hear, understand and practise a photographed page. Sheetly vs MusPal MusPal listens to you play and grades pitch and rhythm, mainly for violin. Sheetly reads the page you own and explains it. Different jobs, honestly compared. Sheetly vs Sheet Music Scanner Sheet Music Scanner is the long-established, cheap scan-and-play app. Sheetly adds looping, take recording, a published benchmark and a coach. Sheetly vs ScanScore ScanScore scans a score, lets you correct it in an editor and exports MusicXML on a desktop. Sheetly photographs a page … Sheetly vs PhotoScore PhotoScore is the professional desktop scanner tied to Sibelius, with a correction editor and handwriting via NotateMe. … Audiveris alternative Audiveris is free and good on flat scans (88% strict F1) but collapses on phone photographs (50%). Sheetly scored 0.… forScore alternative forScore is an iPad PDF reader and library for performers, and a very good one. It does not turn the notes on the page i… Piascore alternative Piascore is a free PDF sheet-music reader for iPad and iPhone. It shows the page; it does not read the notes into sound.… MuseScore app alternative The MuseScore app gives you a huge library of user-uploaded scores with playback. It is not a camera scanner and has no … Simply Piano alternative Simply Piano teaches from its own song library and listens to you play. It does not scan the printed music you already h… Flowkey alternative Flowkey teaches from its own song library and listens to you play. It does not scan the printed pieces you already own. …

Under the hood

What is optical music recognition? A plain-English explanation of optical music recognition: what OMR is, why it is far harder than OCR for text, how a pag… The benchmark A dated, reproducible optical music recognition benchmark. Strict F1 for Sheetly, Audiveris 5.11.0 and oemer on 31 clean… Frequently asked questions Everything people ask about Sheetly: what it can read, how accurate the scanning is, which devices it runs on, what it c…