Bringing music in
Capture / Import Score is on the home screen, and under the More menu (the circle with three dots). It offers four routes: Scan with Camera for a printed page, Import from Photo Library for a photo you have already taken, Import MusicXML for a .musicxml or .xml file from Files or another app, and Import PDF, which reads every page and splits it into one playable score.
If you already have a MusicXML file, you can import it directly without using the scanner. Check the imported score against the original before playback or export. The rest of this guide is for the scanner.
Scan a page the scanner can read
Score reads printed music, and does it on your device. It works through four stages that you will see on screen: preprocessing the image, detecting staff lines, reading symbols and assembling the score. The error messages tell you what it needs: a well-lit image with the staff lines horizontal. If it cannot find a staff, it says so, and a scan with low confidence says that too.
In practice, that means a flat page in even light with no shadow across it, and the camera held square to the page so the staff lines run level. A crease, a shadow or a tilt makes the scanner see lines that are not there, or miss ones that are. Rescan before you start correcting: a better scan saves far more time than careful editing of a bad one.
Correct the scan, flagged notes first
Open the More menu and choose Correct notes…. The Correct Scan screen opens with a plain statement of what you have: a best-effort scan that reads on the device with a heuristic scanner, not a perfect AI, and that can misread pitches or durations or pick up a smudge as a note. It tells you how many notes were flagged as low confidence, and says to check those first.
Flagged notes are marked “review” and carry a confidence percentage. Tap a note to see its controls. Pitch has four buttons: −Oct, −, + and +Oct, which move it down an octave, down a step, up a step and up an octave. Length gives you the note lengths to choose from. Looks right marks the note as checked, and Delete removes it. “Mark all checked” in the toolbar accepts everything once you are satisfied, and Done closes the screen.
Work bar by bar with the page next to you. Check the clef, key signature and time signature at the start of each staff first, because an error there makes every note after it wrong. The commonest errors in a scan are the wrong octave, a note a step out, and a note length that does not add up to the bar.
Check it by ear before you export
Playback is the fastest proof-reader you have. Press play, follow the printed page with your finger, and listen for anything that does not sound like the piece. A wrong pitch is usually obvious by ear well before you notice it on the page, and so is a note of the wrong length. Playback runs from 30 to 240 BPM, so slow it down for a busy passage. You can also choose Piano, Strings, Brass or Guitar for the sound, which can help: a different timbre sometimes makes a wrong note stand out.
If you only need one part, the Parts control at the top shows one staff at a time, and the piano-roll view makes wrong durations easy to see. Fix, play again, and repeat until it matches the page.
Export MusicXML
Open the More menu and choose Export…. The Export Score sheet offers Export as MusicXML, described as opening in Sibelius, Dorico, MuseScore and Finale, and Export as PDF, a print-ready score. Choose MusicXML and the app writes a file named after the score with a .musicxml ending, and hands it to the share sheet so you can send it to Files, Mail, AirDrop or a notation app.
MusicXML carries the notes and structure, not the engraving. Open the file in your notation software and expect to tidy things such as spacing, layout and any markings the scanner did not read. Check the first and last bars against the original before you start work on it.
What it cannot do
Scanning is best-effort and works on printed music. It will not read handwriting reliably, and a dense, crowded score will have more flagged notes than a clean single line. It gives you a head start, not a finished edition, and the correction pass is part of the job.
New scans and imports count towards the app’s free daily allowance, and Pro or SUS4 All-Access removes the limit on score imports. If a score is important, check the pitches by ear and against the page, and keep a copy of the original.