We have scanned 14 piano music books and booklets for a pianist — 990 pages in all. The material ranges from urtext editions to piano methods: the ABRSM editions of Beethoven's Pathétique sonata and Scarlatti's sonatas, the Polish National Edition (Wydanie Narodowe, PWM) of Chopin's études, preludes and waltzes with their companion commentary booklets, Silvestrov's Klavierwerke from Belaieff, The Russian School of Piano Playing from Boosey & Hawkes, Piano Safari and the Czerny-Germer studies.
The two ABRSM volumes were scanned non-destructively on our Image Access Bookeye 5 overhead scanner. The other twelve had their spines cut off and were fed as loose sheets through our Inotec 6x1 — which gives perfectly flat pages with straight staves right into the centre. Everything was scanned in colour at 300 dpi.
Each volume was delivered as a searchable PDF at 300 dpi. All printed text — titles, movement headings, prefaces, tempo markings and the extensive source and performance commentaries — is OCR-processed and searchable, while the music itself is reproduced as an image. The National Edition's commentaries are multilingual, so the OCR was run with English, German, French, Italian, Polish and Spanish simultaneously.
The PDF files were optimised for smaller file size, to roughly a third of the original, and were also delivered in a second set at 150 dpi — between 4 and 36 MB per volume, just right for a tablet on the music stand.
Read more about our service for book scanning — we also digitise sheet music, music books and teaching materials into searchable PDF files.