Digital Music Display for My Organ

[stefanv]

Just want to let everyone know that the software is now available on GitHub: https://github.com/svorkoetter/MusicRack

[stefanv]

If anyone is interested in testing this, please send me a PM. I'm not yet ready to release the source, but I can provide pre-built binaries for Raspberry Pi running Raspbian, or 32- or 64-bit Linux running on Intel or AMD hardware. I still need to whip up a bit of documentation, although the program is very simple to use.

[Warrentdo]

Hello Silken, have you tried adjusting the scan. just scanning at 600DPI in just black and white should be around 300kb a a4 sheet.
colour or grayscale are bloughters.

[Warrentdo]

Fantastic, really fantastic. that does look good for 300DPI if you want a tester im more than happy to help :-) keep up the good work.

[stefanv]

Hi Bruce. I'll post it when it's done. Should be up in a week or two.

[Bruce.Simonson]

Excellent work. Have you had a chance to post to github? I have a couple Raspberry Pi's sitting fallow, and I would like to give this go. Thanks for sharing; again, looks like fine work, that meets a real need.

-Bruce

[stefanv]

Thanks for the feedback and kind words everyone.

My program doesn't insist on collecting the music into its own folders, at least not visibly so. You tell it where your music is, and it reads it from there. The only thing it does do (invisibly, behind the scenes) is convert that music into images that exactly fit on your screen (after cleaning it up as I mentioned earlier), and keeps those images in hidden sub-folders of the music folders you specified. That way, it can load the music quickly and not have to reprocess it every time (which can take 2 or 3 seconds per page).

By the way, I've gotten the ability to add annotations working:

You can select a style, color, or size for each annotation separately, and move them around. They are stored separately from the page images, so even if you rescan a piece of music, the annotations will still be in approximately the right place.

[Silken Path]

While not as elegant, I use Foxit PDF Reader in view mode and have the PC keyboard leaning against the music rest. Easy enough to flip pages quickly enough. I evaluated MusicReader but found Foxit served my purposes even better.

CORRECTION - I misread the instructions for PDF-XChange. In full screen mode, a right-click goes forward and a left click goes backward in the document. This is not as good as having halves (!) but one can tap anywhere to go forward and use the menu to go back. I'll have to see if a prolonged tap goes back... or pops up an annoying context menu.
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I tried Foxit some time ago, but went to PDF-XChange Editor because (1) the registered version can combine 400+ separate documents in a folder into one big one and automatically generate a clickable table of bookmarks based on the file name, and (2) because the free version (which I'm running for now on the Rodger's monitor) can display two pages full screen with single tap (left half, right half) advance and back.

I looked at Music Reader but did not like the way it wanted to collect all the music from however many folders in it's own folders. I've spent years getting things organized (at least for me) and don't need to DUPLICATE the effort -- or waste the space.

By the way, I recently read on Tracker's forum that the registration code can be applied to one desktop and one portable. Just haven't gotten around to registering it on the laptop yet.

Stephan, you're doing GREAT at this. Thank you for posting your progress and results.

[Eric Mack]

I have a Sony USB dictation pedal. Paid $100 but you can find on ebay for $20. The problem is feet are often already occupied. I like the idea of an extra left/right switches or a swipe gesture blocking an IR beam

[ridefree]

I read an article a few weeks ago similar to what you are doing. He used linux, but I assume you are using raspbian or other linux distro so everytihing would apply. I believe he had a usb pedal with two switches left and right. One turned the page forward the other back. I'll try to find the article.

[Eric Mack]

If you haven't looked at at Microsoft Lens, yet, do. They use a method computation photography to capture, flatten, reorient images as if you had a perfect scan on flat glass -- in less time than you could load a sheet of paper in a scanned. Runs on iPhone (and possibly Android)

[voet]

Very impressive, Stefanv. Clearly you have advanced computer programming skills. Thanks for sharing.

[stefanv]

Just an update on this project. I've been doing a lot of work writing software to clean up bad scans (dirty, crooked, bad contrast, show-through from the other side of the page, yellowed paper, etc.) and turn them into something presentable. Here's a scan of part of a piece of music (I don't want to post the whole thing to avoid copyright infringement) out of a book I bought in 1978. The actual scan was at 300dpi, but I've scaled it down for display here.

Notice that the paper is yellowed, the contrast isn't very good, the scan isn't straight, and it's cropped too close to the edge at the bottom. Without any manual intervention, this is what my music display software displays, full size for display on a 1920x1080 screen:

The goal of the program is to make the music as large as possible while still fitting two pages on the display, and leaving a small margin around the edges for aesthetics. To this end it does two passes of colour correction (one to use the full range of available colours before performing other corrections, and the second to produce reasonable contrast), trims and/or pads edges as necessary, straightens the image, and sharpens it a bit. The edge trimming operation was carefully designed to cut off irrelevant information that would cause the music to display smaller than necessary. As a result, the displayed score is often as large or larger than the original paper copy. Here's a low-resolution side-by-side of the original scan and the final output:

Finally, here it is in real life:

[musicmaker84]

While not as elegant, I use Foxit PDF Reader in view mode and have the PC keyboard leaning against the music rest. Easy enough to flip pages quickly enough. I evaluated MusicReader but found Foxit served my purposes even better.

[stefanv]

I think what I'm going to do for now is simply reserve two of the buttons on the synthesizer control panel (the synth runs on its own Raspberry Pi) as page turn buttons, and forward these to the music display Pi (probably via wires). The buttons are pretty easy to reach and press (far easier than turning paper pages).