Best Scan Settings for Sheet Music OCR

For ordinary printed scores, around 300 dpi is a useful starting point rather than a guaranteed optimum. Higher resolution may help small print, but it also increases file size and processing cost. Preserve grayscale information when pages are faded or uneven; let the OMR pipeline choose binarization instead of crushing detail too early.

• Avoid screenshots of browser-rendered pages when the original PDF is available.
• Prefer PNG or TIFF for intermediate images; use high-quality JPEG only when necessary.
• Do not sharpen so aggressively that staff lines and noteheads merge.
• Check the actual pixels, not just the DPI metadata field.

Staff lines are strong geometric anchors. Rotation, perspective, curvature, and shadows make it harder to separate staff lines from beams and text. Keep every full staff visible and avoid cropping clefs, key signatures, barlines, or ledger lines.

• Rotate the page until staves are horizontal.
• Photograph straight-on with even light and no fingers or binding shadow.
• Keep page order and orientation consistent in multi-page PDFs.
• Split pages with very different sizes or scan conditions before testing.

The cleanest cover page is not a useful qualification sample. Test a page containing the densest voices, smallest staff, lyrics, tuplets, or cross-staff notation you expect. If that page needs heavy correction, plan the project around human review or manual entry.