Converting a Music Sheet

[maestralien]

I'm converting a PDF music sheet to EPUB format but no sheets are showed, on the music notation place only random letters, no music notation at all. How to properly convert a music shhet to EPUB? Thanks for helping.

[susan_cassidy]

Music notation is not supported by any font that I know of. You can only display an image of sheet music, not converted to any ebook format.

[maestralien]

Thanks. It means I've to convert music notation to images and embed these images in the pages? Then convert to EPUB format?

[Agama]

What instrument is it for? If it happens to be for guitar then you could convert it to tablature and then to ePub, otherwise you will need to make images into separate pages or see how well your reader copes with the original PDF.

[maestralien]

It's a Piano music sheet which includes a text preface.

[Agama]

What sort of device do you want to view it on? Tablets should be able to manage the PDF.

There are also fonts available for musical notation, (just do a web search for music notation font), so you may be able to manually enter the sheets with such a font and then convert to ePub. I have no idea how good these fonts are, so this may not be practical.

[maestralien]

PDF are not so standard as it seems, especially on Apple devices! Today I discovered it! However, I would need to make an e-book (EPUB) for iPad devices, for now. Then, a Kindle version as well. Thanks.

Moreover, the PDF format does not allow to include multimedia contents such as mp3 or midi files.

[Agama]

It looks like it will be easiest to use a series of images. You could put them all in a single HTML document with heading tags between images, then instruct calibre to page-break on these tags. (If you don't want a header on each page then you could page-break on the image tags instead.)

There is also a tool called img2epub (http://code.google.com/p/img2epub/) which is designed specifically to make an ePub from images.

I don't how well a series of images work with most eReaders but my PRS-300 is slow when rendering a full page image. An alternative would be to use some music notation software on your iPad, (but wouldn't help with the Kindle.)

[maestralien]

Thanks a lot for your suggestions. I'll give it a try..

[Darqref]

Originally Posted by maestralien

I'm converting a PDF music sheet to EPUB format but no sheets are showed, on the music notation place only random letters, no music notation at all. How to properly convert a music shhet to EPUB? Thanks for helping.

I know of a font called boxmarks that has some notation for music included in it, but not the music notes themselves.

I use an application called Noteworthy Composer. From that I've been able to print to a doc file (that doesn't display correctly if I don't have the fonts installed.) I'm using an old version, since I don't want to pay for an upgrade.

What I'd do is take the pdf, re-enter all the data into Noteworthy Composer. From there, I've copy and pasted the print preview to a Word doc, but when I sent it to a friend, it did not print correctly (she didn't have the correct fonts installed.) The copy function apparently puts the image into a Windows Metafile (.wmf) which I pasted into the word doc.

Which is all to say, the result would still be an image embedded in the Epub file, so I don't know if that helps you.

[maestralien]

Originally Posted by Darqref

I know ...

Which is all to say, the result would still be an image embedded in the Epub file, so I don't know if that helps you.

Thanks for the info, I'm trying as well different solutions, but I'd be able to talk with someone which already made the full process and published music e-book, hopefully I'll have the solution in my hands, I'll let anybody here know if and how it works ... thanks.

[cybmole]

there is no support for conventional music notation in html/css so a music sheet e-book is a non starter.

try creating a html page of an orchestra score without using images if you don't believe me!

that's why specialist music score software retails for $500+

[maestralien]

My starting point is a PDF or JPG/TIF files. But I'd need to add some multimedia as well (mp3, mid, video). Looking around what is possible to do and how ... thanks for your advice.

[cybmole]

you can embed mp3 within PDF, not sure if existing audio-capable e-readers can handle that though - I'd bet not.

video will not work in an e-reader, but maybe in a tablet app -- what are your target device(s)

PS amazon have some how to play... type music books in Kindle format - check out their free samples via a Kindle for...whatever... app

some of my guitar students have neat apps on their ipads / iphones for playing back scrolling tabs, ( e.g. songsterr). I've not seen anything that handles notation though.

truefire.com sell professional quality guitar lessons as apps for ipod/ iphone etc. For other multimedia music examples I suggest a browse through itunes catalogues

[maestralien]

Thanks for sharing your experience.. Well, I'm checking the various possibilities, I'd need for sure to create several formats, because a standard does not exist and never it will! So, the only solution is to create different formats. One is using the various online services which I've discovered such as http://www.joomag.com , http://www.myebook.com , http://simplebooklet.com .

The problem is that this way is not possible to protect the book, it is freely available online which I do not want. I've to learn more about e-book technical issues for media embedding. The question is: which e-book we're talking about? I've seen in two days so many formats which run on so many different devices!

Mainly, my book is a PDF with midi and mp3 files as separate files. It is a normal PDF which should be printed to be practiced on the piano.

I wanted just make some different versions for tablets (iPad, Android, Windows) and the main e-book readers, because some of students and customers requested about... So, I'm checking if there is a way to create such formats ......