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I’m looking to know if anyone has any experience using a program called StaffPad.


I have a friend (fellow tuba player) that has had a very difficult time learning programs such as Finale and Sibelius. He wants to create full arrangements, and is from the old-school days of music calligraphy and instead of using a computer, resorts to the almost-lost art of handwritten sheet music of print quality. While a beautiful visual art, it is painfully slow and impractical when by means of a mouse click you can make multiple versions of your arrangement in different keys and for different instrumentations.


I discovered a program called StaffPad. It’s exclusively for Windows tablet devices with digitizer pen support. The company exclusively recommends the Microsoft Surface tablet. The idea is along the lines of handwriting recognition, where you draw the notes out on the staff with the pen, and the computer recognizes it and converts it to print.


I happened to own a Dell Venue Pro 8, a Windows tablet I never got much use out of. I gave my friend this tablet to try out and bought the StaffPad program from the Windows store and picked up a digitizer pen. He had tremendous difficulty getting it to recognize even a single note. I stopped by to try it for myself. Being a computer engineer by trade, I tend to figure out any range of software programs pretty quickly. I sat there for hours trying to figure out why it had about a 25% success rate of recognizing what I was trying to draw. The process was “working”, such that I would draw, and my lines would show up as I drew them, but the program just could not “recognize” what I was drawing. Watched the videos on StaffPad’s YouTube channel with tremendous frustration as they make it look so easy and fluid of a process. The response I received was that they simply don’t support using anything but the Microsoft Surface tablet.


So what I’m wondering is…. Do we both just not “get it” and are doing something wrong? Or is it a compatibility issue with my Dell tablet? I was hoping someone would have some experience to share about StaffPad. I’d prefer not to go buy a Surface (starting around $750) just to find out.


If someone has experience with it and can vouch for it, I’ll go right out and buy a surface. But, other than that I really can’t justify such an expense right now.

Thanks,

-Stu

The demo looks amazing, but I am quite wary.
We've been looking at programs that import a scan into Finale or Sibelius for two decades now, and they still aren't accurate enough to be a worthwhile investment. In fact, Finale has now dropped their version (citing friction from the © nazis).
I doubt that any OCR program is going to do any better with my less-than-stellar manuscript.
Also - importing the notation is only half of the process. You still need to learn the graphics part of the program in order to fit the stuff onto the page and make it look good.

This differs a bit from traditional OCR software because rather than scanning or taking a photo of a sheet of music, this involves using an active digitizer pen to draw directly on the screen and have the computer recognize each note at a time, as well as any articulation, etc.. As far as the interface of the program, we both found it easy enough to use as far as configuring the layout, titling, measures, etc... The videos on youtube make it look amazing and fast to use, but I just haven't been able to have that experience with it.

I have it running on a Surface 3 (the older model prior to the Pro series). For me, the handwriting/note recognition is very good, and my experience is on par with the demo videos. There are some things that I have to be very careful drawing, but that may be my writing style.

That said, I wouldn't say that the functionality is on the level of Finale or Sibelius just yet. It works great for sketching ideas and smaller things, but it really bogs down when doing a larger score of say 10+ instruments/lines. Again that may be my Surface model as it is older. I don't think I would be comfortable having it extract the parts for a performance at this point in it's development. I'm not sure that the current functionality would justify purchasing a Surface, if that is your only reason for getting one.

Remember that Finale was around for nearly a decade before the hardware to run it was affordable, and before the program was fast enough to be practical. Who remembers waiting for the screen to redraw after almost every action?

"Who remembers waiting for the screen to redraw after almost every action?"

I sure don't remember that and I used Finale 2001 for over 10 years. Maybe that was during the Commodore 64 days. But thankfully on Finale 2014.5 now.