Hi All,  I'm prompted to submit this posting because I received an
email from a visitor who wants to have one music roll made, and the
'source file' is a piece of sheet music.

I explained to him that while technology has advanced to the point
where such a project is now feasible, it is still very time consuming
and therefore rather costly.  But, his question got me to thinking
about whether or not technology had advanced to the point where a
computer was capable of "reading" a piece of sheet music and converting
it to a format such as MIDI.

So, I did some searching and came up with a sheet music scanning
program called SharpEye, at http://www.visiv.co.uk/index.htm 

After just one failed attempt, I was able to convert a piece of sheet
music to an excellent MIDI file.  The whole process took just a few
minutes.  Admittedly, I only converted the first page of the sheet
music, and I do see how things like handling 'first ending', 'second
ending', and complex music might require some serious editing.
However, I was quite impressed with how easy it was to use the program.

You can download a free full-function 30-day trial version at

  http://www.visiv.co.uk/dload.htm 

Musically,
John A Tuttle
Player-Care.com
Brick, New Jersey, USA