Tonight I’ve been exploring the Open Source Audiveris program for converting scans of sheet music to musicXML and thence to import into MuseScore. It is a bit complex and, from the results I’ve got so far, I’m not entirely sure it will be worth it. The process has to take significantly less time than just typing the results directly into MuseScore, which I’ve got fairly handy with over the last couple of years.

However, one thing that is important to note is that this software has some dangerous imitators. If you search for Audiveris, you are likely to find audiveris dot net or .com websites. I’ve deliberately made sure I’ve not written those websites in ways that could easily be turned into URLs as both of them look perfectly plausible but the links are set up to point to dangerous looking places.

The true source is the GitHub website (https://github.com/Audiveris/audiveris) which warns against both of the fake ones but it reminds me of the need to be very alert when exploring topics and looking for programs to download. The searches which led me to trying out Audiveris gave me the dodgy sites as well as the GitHub one and, if I wasn’t in the habit of surfing with shields up, I could easily have ended up downloading something I really didn’t want at all.