Photos of music
A photo of a page from a book, or a scan, can live with the song: Stab finds the page in the picture, flattens it, evens out its light, and shows it beside your tab in an Image pane, where you can read along while you write and play. Read Music then reads the music on it into notes (below).The web keeps photos with a song and shows them, but doesn’t read their music into notes: Stab on a Mac, a PC, an iPhone, an iPad or Android does.
Photos of printed music
Not available yet. Not on Mac, Windows and Web.
This isn’t on Mac.
This isn’t on Windows.
This isn’t on Web.
A new song from photos
- Choose Open… (⌘O)Open… (Ctrl+O)Import… from the File menu, or Photos or PDF under Bring a Song In on the home (or Take a Picture, with an iPhone or iPad nearby).
- Pick the pictures, several at once for several pages, or a folder of them. You can also drop them on the home or on a song’s window.
- On the home, under Bring a Song In, choose Import a File, or drop the pictures anywhere on the home.
- Pick one or more pictures.
The web keeps no library: the song opens as a demo to try, and Keep It in Stab Cloud keeps it when you leave (see The Welcome demo).
Pictures opened together make one song, each picture a page, in the order you picked them (a folder’s in the order of their names). Stab takes PNG, JPEG, HEIC, TIFF, WebP and BMP pictures (on the web, those your browser can open); one it can’t open is left out, and it says which.
The song opens with the Score on the left and the pages in an Image pane on the right (on a phone, an Image tab linked to the Score’s). While the photos are being cleaned up, the pane says so along its foot and shows them as they came.
What the Image pane shows
Each page is shown cleaned up: the page found in the photo, its edges and curve straightened, its light evened. In the pane’s menu (right-click the pane):
- Show › Original Photos shows them as they were taken.
- Show › Outline Staves outlines the staves Stab found on each page.
- Add Document… adds more pages, a PDF or more photos, to the song; Remove Document takes them away.
The pictures are kept inside the song’s file, as they came, along with their cleaned pages.
Reading the music
Choose Read All Pages from the Image pane’s menu to read every page into the song, joined across the page turns, or Read Music for the page shown. To read a few bars, drag a rectangle round them first and choose Read Music in Region (Read Music). The Read Music model, which runs on your computer, finds the symbols on the cleaned page; a page takes a few seconds on Apple silicon, up to about 15 on an Intel Mac, and the foot of the pane says how far it’s got. Photos of consecutive pages taken in any order are put back in order by the page numbers printed on them.
What reads well:
- A printed page, flat, in even light, filling most of the picture, sharp enough to read the fingering.
- Notation, TAB and drums, as in a PDF (What Stab reads).
What reads less well, or not at all:
- Pages photographed at a steep angle, in a deep shadow, or curling hard into a book’s spine.
- Blurred or very small print, and faint photocopies.
- Handwritten music isn’t read.
Reading a picture is less certain than reading a drawn PDF: expect bars to check, outlined on the page. Review takes you through them one at a time (Reviewing what was read).
Photos in a song you already have
In any song, make a pane an Image pane from its kind (Panes), then choose Add Document… from its menu. Pick a PDF or pictures. You can also drop pictures on an Image pane.
Not on Mac: Photos of Music….
Not on Windows: Photos of Music….
Not on Web: Photos of Music….