New scanner Joe? Sounds like you'll be busy! I am a dinosaur in that I use Midiscan (by musitek - at musitek.com

It goes like this. I bring out an old songbook (pre 1927 so it's PD) - after a lot of experience I can pretty much tell what will scan in with the least amount of correction (and there is generally a lot), but much of the time I'm looking for something specific and have to take what I can get. I scan it in, saving each page as I go. Midiscan then reads all of them and creates a file. The top half of the screen has the scanned image, the bottom half has the notes it read. I then go through and correct note by note. As I said, how much I have to do varies a great deal. The midiscan interface is very easy to work with, but it's buggy. I work anywhere from a half hour to an hour cleaning up and then click a button for midiscan to convert it to a midi. Once it's a midi I bring it in to cakewalk and do further cleaning up and create the extra verses, instruments, play around with tempo, embedd the name of the tune and my name in the midi, etc. And I'm done.

When I first started about 1/3 of the tunes I scanned in were what I consdiered good enough for me to upload. I'm up around 80% and I sometimes finish a tune to find them too boring to put up. I now upload about 4 out of 5 tunes I scan (of those that work right).

I've done all the things John has with files from the web - and haven't had any success. I agree with John the problem is in the resolution. The files are too small for midiscan to read, but when I resize them - even with correction, the resolution suffers too much. Newer versions of midiscan or smartscore might do better.

As I have a good many songbooks at this point and have that process working so well, I haven't played with the web files as much as I used to. Or maybe I'm getting older and don't have as much patience!!!

I believe in an older thread midiscan got very poor marks from most people. It's expensive as well. Yes, it's a strange beast, but most of my songbooks have songs with more than one page and some pretty complex arrangements, and I know all of its idiosyncracies now, so I stick with it.

Does that answer your questions? Raise any more???