TromboneChat

Sometimes I'll have a pdf score but no standalone trombone part. I can assemble one by cutting out the trombone staff from each page, and pasting it into a fresh pdf. But that is too laborious to actually do. Is there a more automated way? I'm imagining software that lets me use a mouse to drag a boundary around the staff in question, and it automatically discards the rest of the page (or part of the page, if two systems were fit on one page), and moves the selection to a fresh document, repaginating as necessary. And then makes some allowance for times when the trombone doesn't get a staff at all (let me type in a multibar rest or something).

I can import a PDF score into Sibelius with PhotoScore (comes with Sibelius) and have it print out all the individual parts. But you need Sibelius. I'm sure the other good music engraving programs can do the same thing.

Interesting. I've never heard anything good about PhotoScore. The attitude is usually "better than I expected, but with lots of errors. It's faster to type in the part from scratch than to fix the errors".

Okay. Well, that's all I have to offer, I'm afraid.

Sibelius and Photoscore depends on the quality of the PDF file. If it is really clean, there are minimal errors. Hand written scores don't work. Some sources of the original score will have the file in a format that works better than PDF. And some scores, if you know the source, will let you have the score in Sibelius format to allow you to make changes easy.

You just need to do a second pass manually with photo score to clean up the few errors it will make.

AtomicClock wrote: Thu Aug 14, 2025 10:55 am Sometimes I'll have a pdf score but no standalone trombone part. I can assemble one by cutting out the trombone staff from each page, and pasting it into a fresh pdf. But that is too laborious to actually do. Is there a more automated way? I'm imagining software that lets me use a mouse to drag a boundary around the staff in question, and it automatically discards the rest of the page (or part of the page, if two systems were fit on one page), and moves the selection to a fresh document, repaginating as necessary. And then makes some allowance for times when the trombone doesn't get a staff at all (let me type in a multibar rest or something).

Yes, there is. http://partifi.org/ Still requires some work, but it's better than using scissors and tape.

I've been a lot more miss than hit with Photoscore. Unless the part is crazy, I've found it's usually faster just to copy/type it into a fresh "lead sheet" score.

Not a direct answer to your question, but have you thought of asking the community at large if anyone can furnish the missing part?

A while back I was offered a demo version of some software from someone in their marketing department. They wanted me to use it and then write a review of it. I tried it out and it was a big mess. It took just as long, if not longer, for me to do the required edits than it would have for me to input the music in from scratch.

This was back when I was still using Finale, for what it's worth. At one time Finale had some scanning abilities, but they caved to pressure from music publishers who thought it would mean the end of people purchasing music.

I'm curious how the input via pdf works these days. Can anyone post samples to see how it does (original PDF and then unedited import)?

Dave

This seems like the sort of straightforward task AI ought to be able to do.

So I asked Claude.ai...

If you were given an orchestral score in PDF form, could you extract the trombone part?

Alas, no...

I can identify and describe the trombone part from an orchestral score PDF, but I have some limitations in terms of "extraction":

What I can do:

Read through the full score and locate the trombone staff/staves
Describe the trombone part in detail (notes, rhythms, dynamics, articulations, etc.)
Tell you which measures contain trombone entrances, solos, or important passages
Explain the trombone's role in different sections of the piece
Help you understand the notation and musical content

What I cannot do:

Create a separate, clean PDF file containing only the trombone part
Generate new sheet music files or manipulate the PDF to isolate parts
Produce playable audio of the trombone part

i also asked if a non-free version of claude.ai would be able to do this, but the answer was still "no".

It seems claude.ai just doesn't do images at all so some other AI bot that can create JPGs might be more capable.

brassmedic wrote: Thu Aug 14, 2025 2:41 pm http://partifi.org/ Still requires some work, but it's better than using scissors and tape.

I've had partifi crash on me a few times (or maybe I crashed it?), and haven't gotten anything out of it yet.

boneapart wrote: Thu Aug 14, 2025 10:38 pm Not a direct answer to your question, but have you thought of asking the community at large if anyone can furnish the missing part?

No, but that's because I'm actually more interested in the software tool aspect. Maybe I'll take a crack at writing my own, if I can't get partifi to work.

When the time comes, the orchestra librarian will pass out full parts. I was just taking an early peek at the IMSLP score to see if there is anything interesting to look forward to.

AtomicClock wrote: Fri Aug 15, 2025 6:06 pm
I've had partifi crash on me a few times (or maybe I crashed it?), and haven't gotten anything out of it yet.

How does it "crash"? I don't remember that ever happening.

When uploading a file, the progress bar never gets to the end. I'm giving it a handwritten score, so if it's trying to do some computation on its own, it'll choke. I initially gave it a file over its 50 MB limit. It rejected that as an upload, but didn't reject it as an IMSLP reference. But the progress bar stalled in its initial state. I tried uploading the first several pages, and the progress bar got almost to the end, but stopped there.

AtomicClock wrote: Fri Aug 15, 2025 8:02 pm When uploading a file, the progress bar never gets to the end. I'm giving it a handwritten score, so if it's trying to do some computation on its own, it'll choke. I initially gave it a file over its 50 MB limit. It rejected that as an upload, but didn't reject it as an IMSLP reference. But the progress bar stalled in its initial state. I tried uploading the first several pages, and the progress bar got almost to the end, but stopped there.

Yeah, I guess that's too complicated. It separates out each line in the score. If you have a huge score with lots of parts and they don't necessarily appear on every page, I don't think it's gonna work.

With MuseScore Studio, you can upload a PDF and get a MuseScore Studio score back that you can edit in MuseScore. Works well enough.

https://scan-score.com/en/how-to-scan-s ... tal%20copy.

brassmedic wrote: Thu Aug 14, 2025 2:41 pm

AtomicClock wrote: Thu Aug 14, 2025 10:55 am Sometimes I'll have a pdf score but no standalone trombone part. I can assemble one by cutting out the trombone staff from each page, and pasting it into a fresh pdf. But that is too laborious to actually do. Is there a more automated way? I'm imagining software that lets me use a mouse to drag a boundary around the staff in question, and it automatically discards the rest of the page (or part of the page, if two systems were fit on one page), and moves the selection to a fresh document, repaginating as necessary. And then makes some allowance for times when the trombone doesn't get a staff at all (let me type in a multibar rest or something).

Yes, there is. http://partifi.org/ Still requires some work, but it's better than using scissors and tape.

Partifi is dead. The page still loads, but you can't upload scores anymore. There's an equivalent tablet app that works decently called Partifier.



My experience with Photoscore is it works great as long as you're working with a pdf that was directly exported from a notation software. I've had times where there were no mistakes at all, and times where it was mostly right, with a few mistakes here and there. But I've never gotten any results that were good (and usually not even remotely useful) with scans, both with older scores that were not computer-engraved and with scans of computer-engraved scores (let alone with scans of manuscripts).

It's too bad Photoscore stopped development. I used to use the crap out of it but it's just no longer useful.

Soundslice (https://www.soundslice.com/sheet-music-scanner) has some pretty darn good OCR functionality. It's all online/cloud-based and not a standalone application. You can upload PDFs and it will notify you when it's finished analyzing. It will then ask you to confirm or correct things it's not sure of (time/key sigs, dotted notes, articulations, slurs/ties, etc.) so you can make corrections before it finalizes. It lets you do some editing after it finishes but it's not nearly as robust as what the OP described. That requires Sibelius, Dorico, etc. You can export to several formats (PDF, MusicXML, MIDI, etc.). I believe it is AI driven and continues to learn over time (so it can take over the world and destroy the human race at some point).

I usually let it analyze, do some online editing, and then export it to MusicXML for Sibelius cleanup. It is subscription based but the pricing seems reasonable.

I don’t doubt that you can create a part using technology but it might be faster to write it out (by hand) from the score or input it into Finale or some other notation program and bypass all of the conversions. It’s old school but it works.

musicofnote wrote: Sat Aug 16, 2025 12:07 am With MuseScore Studio, you can upload a PDF and get a MuseScore Studio score back that you can edit in MuseScore. Works well enough.

https://scan-score.com/en/how-to-scan-s ... tal%20copy.

I used that to change the clef on a part today. I was done very quickly. The part was 2 pages and had a lot of notations and accidentals. It got everything right except it left out scoops and falls. doing it by hand would have been at least an hour, probably more with all of the articulations and slurs and what not, and then I'd have to check it. I was done in 15 minutes, including checking.

I've used it in the past and had absolutely horrible results - lots of notes shifted by 1/32nd note. Things like that. But this time it was nearly perfect. They have certainly fixed something.

Mobile Sheets can sort of do that. You can crop each page to show only what you want to see. If you have two systems on a page, you can make a copy of the page and then crop the second page to show only the second system's music. After that, you can set Mobile Sheets to vertical scrolling mode to view the part during performance. There is an option to save a pdf copy with all the changes but I never tried printing it out. This method work for me for last minute 10-mins before downbeat take-the-part-from-the-score moments, not ideal but it works.

I thought of that. But there's something in MobileSheets (at least the time I tried it) that limits the size of the crop. I couldn't bring the top and bottom close enough to fully obscure the other lines.

... but even so, it works pretty well. I don't mind seeing the whole low brass section together.

I used photoscore but is ridiculous because works really bad never worked well.I try but had a really bad result