The goal of an OMR application is to allow the end-user to transcribe a score image into its symbolic counterpart. This opens the door to its further use by many kinds of digital processing such as playback, music edition, searching, republishing, etc.
The Audiveris application is built around the tight integration of two main components: an OMR engine and an OMR editor.
The OMR engine combines many techniques, depending on the type of entities to be recognized — ad-hoc methods for lines, image morphological closing for beams, external OCR for texts, template matching for heads, neural network for all other fixed-size shapes.
Significant progresses have been made, especially regarding poor-quality scores, but experience tells us that a 100% recognition ratio is simply out of reach in many cases.
The OMR editor thus comes into play to overcome engine weaknesses in convenient ways. The user can preselect processing switches to adapt the OMR engine before launching the transcription of the current score. Then the remaining mistakes can generally be quickly fixed via the manual editing of a few music symbols.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Good recognition efficiency on real-world quality scores.
- Effective support for large scores (with up to hundreds of pages).
- Convenient user-oriented interface to detect and correct most OMR errors.
- Cross-platform support – runs under Linux, macOS, and Windows.
Website: github.com/Audiveris/audiveris
Support:
Developer: Audiveris
License: GNU Affero General Public License v3.0

Audiveris is written in Java. Learn Java with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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