AnthemScore

AnthemScore is specialized software designed for automatic music transcription. It’s developed by Lunaverus and has been recognized for its ability to convert audio files into sheet music or guitar tabs with impressive accuracy. It does make some mistakes though, which is why you will probably also need to get hold of score editing software. Depending on which version you buy, 2 of the 3 have a built in editor.

It’s not a subscription model of purchase, you simply buy it. AnthemScore Lite costs £25.59 and the Professional version retails at £34.32. Both of these come with one year of updates. Then there’s the Studio version which costs £87.36 and comes with a lifetime of free updates. That can be very cost effective. The Lite version has no editor.

So what does it actually do? You can feed a WAV or MP3 file into it which will turned into, for example, a piano reduction of the track you’ve loaded. First it will do the AI analysis and you’ll get a screen that looks like the featured image. Very quickly though, it will be followed by this:-

There’s a MIDI play back available. and you can have it transcribed into a range of instruments such as Guitar, Violin, Cello, Harp, Bassoon, Sax or Concert Ukulele. Yes, really!

In the Edit > Sheet Music settings you can set the guitar output to be in tabs and even select what type of instrument does the MIDI playback.

This particular version, by the Wiener Philharmoniker, has a choral part added, hence that odd high note which you might want to edit out. You can either use the built in editor (beyond the scope of this review) or export the project as a MusicXML file. Actually you can export it in a number of formats, such as PDF or MIDI or a CSV containing Beat and Note data or the Spectrogram Amplitudes.

It does have some weaknesses. In trying to transcribe a pieces of music that had a mandolin playing, the output score doubled up many of the notes. You can understand why that might happen (it would probably do the same for a bazouki or twelve string guitar) so if you want to transcribe music from those twin stringed instruments you’ll definitely need to either buy a copy with a built in editor or get hold of some music editing software like Sibelius or MuseScore.

Some have criticised the license management module but we found no real issues with it. There are, after all, quite a few bits of software that open up new functionality after entering a license key, especially in WordPress website plug-ins.

Why would you buy this? Well if you have a pressing need to create piano reductions of orchestral music, perhaps because you’ve got a dance school and you want the music for the pianist, you’d certainly want this pieces of software. Other options are for instrumentalists wanting to get hold of some sheet music, or guitar tabs, for a piece that might be hard to get hold of, well, look into this software. if you do a lot of that then even the most expensive purchase option will be cost effective. This is a very powerful tool indeed.