What musical notation and instruments does Sheet Music Scanner support?

Sheet Music Scanner reads printed sheet music from a photo, image file, or PDF and plays it back. Its recognition covers melody, harmony, and rhythm symbols, and its playback engine covers dozens of instruments. If your score uses standard Western notation with treble, bass, or alto (viola) clefs, it is likely to work. Scores with handwritten notation, unusual graphic notation, or symbols outside the list below may not be recognized reliably.

Notation it recognizes

The app reads the following symbols, grouped by what they affect:

Tied notes are recognized specifically, so a note held across a barline or between notes of the same pitch is played as one sustained sound rather than two separate attacks.

This list is the practical boundary for judging whether your score will scan well. A typical printed piano, violin, or choral part built from these symbols is within scope. A lead sheet with chord symbols but no written melody, or a contemporary score using extended notation, falls outside what the feature list describes.

Instruments available for playback

You choose the instrument, and the app plays the recognized notes with that sound. The supported instruments are:

Accordion, Acoustic Bass, Alto Sax, Bagpipes, Banjo, Bass Guitar, Celeste, Cello, Choir, Clarinet, Double Bass, Flute, French Horn, Guitar (Classical, Clean, Distortion), Glockenspiel, Harp, Mandolin, Marimba, Oboe, Organ (Percussive, Pipe, Reed, Rock, Tonewheel), Piano, Recorder, Tenor Sax, Trombone, Trumpet, Tuba, Vibraphone, Viola, Violin, Xylophone.

A few things worth noting from that list:

• Guitar has three variants — Classical, Clean, and Distortion — so you can match the tone to the style of the piece.
• Organ has five variants — Percussive, Pipe, Reed, Rock, and Tonewheel.
• Choir is a single option, useful for vocal scores where you want to hear the lines rather than a specific solo instrument.
• Saxophones appear as Alto Sax and Tenor Sax, and the app supports actual instrument pitch for transposing instruments, so a part written for a transposing instrument plays at the sounding pitch rather than the written pitch.

Playing separate voices and staves

The app supports voices played in tandem — for example, both piano hands together, or all the choir voices at once. It also supports playing individual staves separately, such as the right or left piano hand on its own. This matters if you want to learn one hand at a time, check a single choral line, or isolate a part that is hard to hear in the full texture.

Pitch and tempo controls

• Pitch standard: adjustable from the standard 440 Hz across a range of 380–480 Hz, so you can match an instrument or ensemble tuning.
• Transposition: pitch shift by semitones, up to two octaves up or down.
• Speed: between 50 and 330 beats per minute.

How to check whether your score is supported

1. Open the app and scan the sheet with your device camera, or import a PDF or image file (PNG, JPG, TIFF, and other common image types are supported).
2. Look at the recognized notes on screen — the app highlights notes and symbols as they are played, so you can see immediately whether a passage was read correctly.
3. Choose the instrument and speed, then play. You can start playback from anywhere in the song by tapping the bar.
4. If a section is misread, check whether it uses symbols outside the recognized list above — that is the most common reason a passage will not play as written.

Multiple pages are supported, so longer pieces can be scanned and played across page breaks. Recognized scores can also be exported as MIDI, MusicXML, audio (M4A/AAC, MP3, WAV), or PDF to a cloud drive, which is useful if you want to edit the result in notation software or share it.