Optical Music Recognition

Audiveris is probably the most feature complete (although not too great) music recognition program. 

Installing Audiveris

It's super complicated to install Audiveris, and there's no portable version available. You could try to follow the manual (https://audiveris.github.io/audiveris/_pages/install/README/), but it's not written in a step-by-step manner and it's split over many pages.

So here are the step-by-step instructions:

3. Download the OCR data from https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tessdata/blob/main/eng.traineddata

4. Make the folder "C:\Program Files\tesseract-ocr\tessdata".

5. Copy eng.traineddata to "C:\Program Files\tesseract-ocr\tessdata"

6. Download Audiveris (Windows) from: https://github.com/Audiveris/audiveris/releases

7. Double-click Audiveris_Setup-x.x.x-windows-x86_64.exe and follow the instructions to install Audiveris.

9. In Notepad, create a file with the following text:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<plugins>

    <!-- MuseScore -->

    <plugin id="MuseScore" tip="Invoke MuseScore on score XML">

        <arg>C:\Program Files\MuseScore 4\bin\MuseScore4.exe</arg>

        <arg>{}</arg>

    </plugin>

</plugins>

10. Save this file to  %APPDATA%\AudiverisLtd\audiveris\config\plugins.xml

11. Download Musescore from https://musescore.org/en/download/musescore.msi.

12. Double-click the musescore.msi file and following the instructions to install Musescore.

Running Audiveris

13. Open Audiveris.

14. Change the default Book parameters to sensible defaults (the below are for typical lead sheets):

15. Tools > Options >pdfResolution: 400 :

16. Drag and drop the song PDF to Audiveris.

17. Click the "Transcribe the whole book" button:

18. Look for any errors or missing things such as text. 

19. Highlight an error by shift-dragging across the error to highlight the entire symbol.

20. In the interactive pane (on the right-hand side of the screen), correct the mistake – here are some keyboard shortcuts from the manual (https://audiveris.github.io/audiveris/_pages/ui_tools/add_inter/#shortcuts-table):

21. Note that you have to first click an icon from the shape catalog to get to the next level:

22. After you get to the second level you can actually drag and drop items onto the page.

23. There are some examples in the handbook on how to correct errors: https://audiveris.github.io/audiveris/_pages/ui_examples/README/

24. Export the file to Musecsore by clicking the "Invoke Default Plugin" button:

Check Musescore and determine whether you need to make any more corrections in Audiveris, or whether it's good enough to fix the rest up in Musescore.