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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.
- Good recognition efficiency on real-world quality scores (as those seen on the IMSLP site)
- Effective support for large scores (with up to hundreds of pages)
- Convenient user-oriented interface to detect and correct most OMR errors
- Available on Windows, Linux and macOS
- Open source
The core of engine music information (OMR data) is fully documented and made publicly available,
either directly via XML-based .omr project files or via the Java API of this software.
Audiveris comes with an integrated exporter to write (a subset of) this OMR data into
MusicXML 4.0 format.
In the future, other exporters are expected to build upon OMR data to support other target formats.
On a rather regular basis, typically every 6 to 12 months, a new release is made available on the dedicated Audiveris Releases page.
The goal of a release is to provide significant improvements, well tested and integrated, resulting in a software as easy as possible to install and use.
Since the release 5.5, an installer is provided for each of the main OSes (Windows, Linux and macOS) and comes with a pre-installed Java Runtime Environment (JRE). You can download any installer file from the Assets section, at the end of the chosen release:
| OS name | Installer file extension |
|---|---|
| Windows | .msi |
| Linux | .deb |
| macOS | .dmg |
Additionally for Linux, a flatpak package, also with a suitable JRE included, can be installed from the Flathub site.
See installers details in the handbook installation section.
The Audiveris project is developed on GitHub, the site you are reading.
Any one can clone, build and run this software.
The needed tools are git, gradle and a Java Development Kit (jdk),
as described in the handbook sources section.
There are two main branches in the Audiveris project:
- the
masterbranch is the GitHub default branch; we use it for releases, and only for them;
To build from this branch, you will need ajdkfor Java version 21 or higher. - the
developmentbranch is the one where all developments continuously take place; Periodically, when a release is to be made, we merge the development branch into the master branch;
As of this writing, the source code on development branch requires ajdkfor Java version 21.
See details in the Wiki article dedicated to the chosen development workflow.
Users and developers are advised to read the Audiveris User Handbook, and the more general Wiki set of articles.
