Audiveris is an Optical Music Recognition (OMR) tool designed to transcribe musical scores from image formats into symbolic representations for further digital processing, such as playback, editing, or republishing.
Key Features:
Combines advanced OMR techniques, including OCR for text, neural networks for shape recognition, and morphological operations for beams and lines.
Supports large-scale scores with up to hundreds of pages, ensuring efficient processing of complex musical content.
Includes an intuitive editor for manual correction of transcription errors, enhancing accuracy in challenging cases.
Available on Windows, Linux, and macOS, with pre-installed Java Runtime Environment (JRE) for seamless operation.
Open-source architecture, enabling developers to access and extend its core OMR data via XML-based .omr files or Java API.
Audience & Benefit:
Ideal for musicians, educators, researchers, and publishers seeking reliable tools to transcribe and manipulate musical scores. Audiveris saves time by providing high-efficiency recognition on real-world quality scores, while its flexible export capabilities (e.g., MusicXML) enable integration with other music software.
Audiveris can be installed via winget for easy setup across supported platforms.
- The site https://audiveris.com (note the `.com` extension)
- has nothing to do with Audiveris and seems to be a fraudulent site.
- The site is aesthetically pleasing
- and looks like an advertisement for Audiveris software.
- However, users report that links redirect to pages
- dedicated to cryptocurrencies, sports betting, etc.
- It has all the hallmarks of a phishing site…
The goal of an OMR application is to allow the end-user to transcribe a score image into
its symbolic counterpart.
This opens the door to its further use by many kinds of digital processing such as
playback, music edition, searching, republishing, etc.
The Audiveris application is built around the tight integration of two main components:
an OMR engine and an OMR editor.
The OMR engine combines many techniques, depending on the type of entities to be recognized
-- ad-hoc methods for lines, image morphological closing for beams, external OCR for texts,
template matching for heads, neural network for all other fixed-size shapes.
Significant progresses have been made, especially regarding poor-quality scores,
but experience tells us that a 100% recognition ratio is simply out of reach in many cases.
The OMR editor thus comes into play to overcome engine weaknesses in convenient ways.
The user can preselect processing switches to adapt the OMR engine before launching the
transcription of the current score.
Then the remaining mistakes can generally be quickly fixed
via the manual editing of a few music symbols.
Key characteristics
Good recognition efficiency on real-world quality scores (as those seen on the IMSLP site)
Effective support for large scores (with up to hundreds of pages)
Convenient user-oriented interface to detect and correct most OMR errors
Available on Windows, Linux and macOS
Open source
The core of engine music information (OMR data) is fully documented and made publicly available,
either directly via XML-based .omr project files or via the Java API of this software.
Audiveris comes with an integrated exporter to write (a subset of) this OMR data into
4.0 format.
In the future, other exporters are expected to build upon OMR data to support other target formats.
On a rather regular basis, typically every 6 to 12 months, a new release is made available
on the dedicated Audiveris Releases page.
The goal of a release is to provide significant improvements, well tested and integrated,
resulting in a software as easy as possible to install and use.
Since the release 5.5, an installer is provided for each of the main OSes
(Windows, Linux and macOS) and comes with a pre-installed Java Runtime Environment (JRE).
You can download any installer file from the Assets section, at the end of the chosen release:
OS name
Installer file extension
Windows
.msi
Linux
.deb
macOS
.dmg
Additionally for Linux, a flatpak package, also with a suitable JRE included,
can be installed from the Flathub site.
See installers details in the handbook installation section.
Development versions
The Audiveris project is developed on GitHub, the site you are reading.
Any one can clone, build and run this software.
The needed tools are git, gradle and a Java Development Kit (jdk),
as described in the handbook sources section.
There are two main branches in the Audiveris project:
the master branch is the GitHub default branch;
we use it for releases, and only for them.
the development branch is the one where all developments continuously take place;
Periodically, when a release is to be made, we merge the development branch into the master branch.
See details in the Wiki article dedicated to the chosen development workflow.
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