Playscore 2 is a unique app available for both iOS and Android users. It is a full notation music recognition app that can play all kinds of music direct from an image.
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You can simply use your phone or tablet to photograph the pages of your score or sheet music. Within seconds, Playscore 2 can playback the music. Perfect if you want to:
- instantly hear what the sheet music sounds like
- create backing tracks by muting the main instrument part – it is so easy to silence parts and create self-accompaniment music minus one files
- solo your part if you are trying to learn your vocal lines in a choral score – instantly create rehearsal parts for different voices in a vocal arrangement
- Change tempo to speed up and slow down the playback without affecting pitch
- Loop sections
- Transpose either the whole score or one part
- Export the score as MusicXML for further editing in Musescore, Sibelius, or any Music Notation Software
- Export the sheet music as a MIDI file for further editing and arrangement
- If you are a choir leader you can create rehearsal parts for your choir members. They can play these back for free with the Playscore free version. Note that you need to purchase the professional version to create the arrangements.
- You can also import PDFs – perfect if you like to source music from sites such as IMSLP.
Table of contents
Is Playscore 2 Free?
To access the full functionality of Playscore 2 – including all the arrangement tools, export and import features, then you will need to purchase a professional subscription. This is currently £3.99 per month or £22.49 per year. An absolute bargain!
If you simply want to play back arrangements that your choir leader or teacher has prepared for you, then you can do this with the free version.
If you want to know more about this and similar apps and software, then refer to our complete article on music scanning software and apps. Or watch our detailed step-by-step video below to see Playscore 2 in action.
Where Can You Get Playscore 2?
PlayScore 2 is available for Android and iOS users. Install it on your phone or tablet.
You can download PlayScore 2 For Free – then upgrade if you wish to access all the additional arrangement features.
Playscore 2 Video Tutorial and Review
PlayScore Video Review Chapters
0:00 Introduction
2:00 Photograph a score from within Playscore 2
2:32 Demonstration of photographing and playback of score
2:50 Tempo adjustment
3:14 Adding multiple pages from sheet music
3:29 Staff settings – change instrument sounds, volume of each stave, transpose score
4:00 Demo of violin sound (!)
4:27 Playback of score with woodwind sound and piano
4:43 Create self-accompaniment file
5:08 Looping a section of score
5:31 Document and playback settings
6:29 Crop and mask *
7:02 Import sheet music from photographs
7:30 How to share Playscore 2 docs via email
7:59 Free version of Playscore 2 on Android – receiving score via email
8:57 Photographing a more complex multi-part score
9:50 Playback of multi-part sheet music with multiple instrument sounds
10:10 Create a rehearsal file for different vocal parts in a choral score
10:54 Share rehearsal files with different voice sections in a choir
11:24 Import sheet music from PDF
13:11 Playback of articulation within the sheet music
13:41 Staff voices and barber shop quartet music (two parts on one stave)
14:39 Sheet music to MIDI
14:58 Sheet music to MusicXML for Musescore, Finale, Sibelius
15:44 Comparison of Playscore 2 versions – Free, Productivity, Professional
17:00 Verdict – yes I recommend Playscore 2
- note: one thing I did not pick up on in the video. What the masking is intended for is to let you mask out unwanted music, eg when the song you want starts half way down the page. That way you can export only the music you actually want.
Find out more about the Playscore 2 App here on the Playscore official site.
Find out more about Playscore 2 and all the best music scanning apps and software in our detailed companion post.
New Updates for iOS – including Text Recognition!
The latest update for iOS (Jan 2022) has a number of performance improvements and some fantastic new features.
- PlayScore 2 now recognises text such as lyrics and musical directions and chord symbols. These now appear in exported MusicXML. The OCR text support means that lyrics etc are included when you export to a music editor like MuseScore. With the improved accuracy and performance, getting from a PDF score to accurate editable music is pretty well instant.App now uses all available processor cores – builds a typical PDF at around 4 pages a second
- Hundreds of accuracy improvements and more symbols
- Accompaniment Count-in feature
- Auto-lock suppressed while app playing
- New recorder sound makes 19 high quality instruments
- And by popular request! New count-in feature. This lets you set a number of bars to be counted in by the app before it starts playing. It gives you time to pick up your instrument. And the auto-lock suspension stops the device going to sleep while PlayScore 2 is playing.
New! Latest Android Update Enhancements
PlayScore 2’s newest Android update has lots of new features and improvements:
- rearranging pages,
- rotate, zoom, crop and mask,
- multi-export,
- MIDI, accuracy and stability improvements
- and more …
Watch More – PlayScore 2 Official Video
Playscore 2 – Our Verdict
For the money, there is simply not another app quite like Playscore 2. The depth of features it offers are phenomenal. It is not 100% perfect, so you may find that some scores do not scan as well as others. And when you export, again some music exports better than others.
But think about the complex music recognition tasks this little app is performing! It can play back with expression, and it is so quick and easy to create accompaniments or listen to what a piece of music should sound like. For choir leaders, it offers a fast way to give all your choir members an easy way to learn their parts.
Overall, we have had a lot of success with PlayScore 2, it is easy to use and works very well. You can read multiple staves, mute individual instrument lines (or solo them), change the voices in the app, and, even more, you can save the file as MIDI or MusicXML. The files we created imported really well into MuseScore, for further editing (nb you need to use the paid version of MuseScore for this feature, but it is very inexpensive).
In short, PlayScore 2 is a versatile and very powerful music scanning app.