Guide

Scanning sheet music: resolution, format and settings

Which dpi, colour or greyscale, which file format? The scanner settings that work for sheet music – plus A3, stapled editions and phone scans.

Sheet music is an awkward special case for scanners: very fine lines, a great deal of white, often pencil markings, frequently A3 or unusual portrait formats, and usually yellowed. Most devices default to settings designed for text documents, which for music produce either unreadably thin note stems or needlessly huge files.

Here are the settings that have proven themselves in practice.

The short version

If you only take one value away: 300 dpi in greyscale. For sheet music, that is the point where legibility and file size fit together best.

Resolution: why 300 dpi

• 200 dpi is enough to read on a large screen, but compression visibly frays note stems and beams. Printing gets ugly.
• 300 dpi renders even 32nd-note beams, slurs and small grace notes cleanly and prints to A4 without loss. That is the right choice for practically all printed music.
• 400–600 dpi is only needed in two cases: very faint or densely engraved old editions, and if you plan to run optical music recognition (OMR) later. The price is four to eight times the file size.

Going above 600 dpi gains nothing with paper originals except storage consumption – at that point you are scanning the paper texture, not the music.

Colour, greyscale or black and white

This is the setting that most often goes wrong.

Black and white (bitonal, 1 bit) produces the smallest files and is a common scanner default. For sheet music it is risky: every pixel is rounded hard to black or white. Thin slurs break up, pencil markings disappear entirely, and yellowed paper either turns grey or eats the staff lines depending on the threshold. But pencil is exactly what you want to keep on ensemble parts – breath marks, cues, repeats.

Greyscale is the compromise and the right choice for music: pencil survives, slurs stay smooth, the file stays small.

Colour is only needed if parts carry coloured markings or you want to document a historical original. Otherwise colour triples the file size with no musical benefit.

File format: PDF, one file per part

PDF is the standard that every tablet, every music-reader app and every printer handles. Two rules:

1. One file per part, several pages per file. A four-page Trumpet 1 part is one PDF with four pages – not four separate files, and not part of a combined PDF containing every instrument.
2. No image files. JPG or PNG per page may look convenient, but they lose the page relationship and are awkward to distribute.

If your scanner only produces combined PDFs across the whole stack, that is not a problem as long as you can split them afterwards. Notenarchiv can break combined PDFs into individual parts directly in the browser.

A3, landscape and opened double pages

A large share of an ensemble’s collection is A3 or gets scanned as an opened double page. On a tablet that is unusable: the page displays sideways, and rotating it shows two half pages at once.

The right approach is to split A3 pages into two A4 pages in correct reading order. Some scanners can do this directly (“split page”, “book page split”). If not, you split it afterwards – in Notenarchiv the app detects landscape and A3 pages automatically and offers to split them with one click.

The same applies to parts originally printed as fold-out or concertina sets: what was practical on paper is an obstacle digitally.

Sheet feeder or flatbed

The automatic document feeder (ADF) is many times faster for loose sheets and should be the default. Watch two things: remove staples first, and do not overload the stack – double feeds only become apparent once a page is missing.

The flatbed is what you need for stapled booklets, brittle paper and anything you do not want to take apart. Press the lid down gently so the inner page does not tilt away.

For stapled editions you want to keep intact: a book scanner or a phone scanning app with edge detection is often gentler than trying to press the booklet onto the flatbed.

Automatic corrections: what to turn on and off

• Deskew: on. Nobody enjoys reading crooked staves, and because staff lines are straight, the correction works very reliably on music.
• Auto-crop: on, if it hits the sheet format. Check the first scans – some devices crop too tightly on very white margins and clip the last stave.
• Blank-page detection: off. A blank verso is sometimes intentional in music (so that a rest falls where you turn the page), and the automation does not make that call reliably. Better to delete pages deliberately afterwards.
• Text sharpening / OCR optimisation: off. These filters are designed for letters and regularly destroy beams in music.

Scanning with a smartphone

For the odd straggler a phone is fine, provided three things are right:

1. Even light without shadows. By a window, not directly under the ceiling lamp above you.
2. A scanning app with edge detection and perspective correction (the notes and files apps on iOS and Android can do this). An ordinary photo is not a scan.
3. Greyscale or document mode, not the colour filter with maximum contrast.

For hundreds of parts, a feeder scanner remains considerably faster.

Checking: five seconds per part

Before a file goes into the archive, take a quick look:

• Are all pages there, and in the right order?
• Is the instrument name legible on page 1?
• Is nothing clipped – especially the last stave at the bottom?
• Is the orientation right, or is a page sideways?
• Is the file a plausible size? Well under 200 KB per page suggests over-compression, well over 5 MB suggests unnecessarily high resolution.

Those five seconds are the cheapest quality control in the whole project.

And then?

How to turn finished scans into an ordered archive – numbering, naming, assignment and rollout – is covered in the guide Digitising sheet music: a guide for bands and orchestras.

Rotating, deleting pages, splitting A3 and breaking up combined PDFs all work in Notenarchiv directly in the browser, with no extra PDF software. Whatever the scanner did not get quite right can be straightened out afterwards.