Many musicians still have scores that live on paper: a chart picked up at rehearsal, a page from a method book, or a handwritten arrangement that is too useful to leave in a folder. This week we built a way to bring those pages into Segno with the camera on your Android device.
Tap Scan score in your library, point the camera at a page, and Segno helps you capture it. Once the page is in view, the scanner looks for its edges so you can spend less time worrying about getting the phone perfectly straight and more time checking the music itself.
A clean page without the fuss
After taking a picture, you get a preview before anything is saved. If the corners need a little help, adjust the perspective. You can also trim away the edges of the photo and choose the look that makes the music easiest to read: automatic, original, grayscale, or black and white.
Different pages need different treatment. A bright, clean photocopy may look best in the original style, while an older page can benefit from a little more contrast. For the occasions when the ready-made choices are not quite right, custom appearance settings give you more control without making them part of your everyday workflow.
Build a score one page at a time
Books and multi-page handouts are welcome. Choose Scan next to keep adding pages, then finish when the score is complete. You can retake a page if someone moved the stand, the light changed, or the first capture simply was not the one you wanted.
When you finish, Segno brings the pages together as a PDF in your library and opens the usual score details. That means a scanned score can live alongside the rest of your collection—ready for the same organization, viewing, annotations, and practice habits as any other score.
A small bridge between the real world and your library
The point of this project was never to make a camera app for its own sake. It was to make the distance between “I have this piece of music” and “I can practice it in Segno” a little shorter. We are looking forward to seeing what finds its way into your library.
The score scanner is currently available on Android. As always, the interface and feature details are part of an active product, so we will keep improving the experience as we use it with more kinds of music and more kinds of pages.