To ensure that you have the best experience with Livescore, here are some recommendations concerning PDF files you will import:

What should you really not import: 

• If the number of pages of the piece you are trying to convert exceeds the amount of Livescore credits you own for the current month (maximum 10 pages in the free trial) , you will not be able to convert your sheet music to LiveScore.
• Vertical staves. In this case, you should first rotate the file 90 degrees to make the staves appear horizontally.  
• Chord chart, lyrics & chords, tablatures, or any other type of score that doesn't display staves.
• Handwritten music.
• Graphic notation, complex contemporary notation, or mensural notation.
• A "double-page score" on a single PDF page.
• Scores whose barlines are located in the interstaff only.

• Scores with guitar tablature

As a general rule, the cleaner your PDF, the better the LiveScore output. Of course, the musical content also plays a role in the quality of the output. Here are some hints:

What will impair the LiveScore recognition:

• Poorly scanned documents e.g.: 

- Partially erased:

- Too low resolution:

- Very bent (warped) staves:

- Very close/dense staves:

- Damaged musical elements:

- Scanning marks:

- Poorly cropped scores :

• Handwritten-like fonts

• Noteheads other than regular, cross, harmonic and triangle will be ignored (diamond, beat without stem, slash, arrow, etc.)
• 4- and 3-line percussion staves will be ignored
• Scores with systems whose number of staves is not always the same throughout the piece: instruments will be mixed-up

• Multiple separate parts one after the other merged into 1 large PDF file (In this case you would want to have a separate PDF file for each part)
• Staves/systems whose shape changes (e.g. a third staff that pops in the middle of the system, or a one-line percussion staff that transforms into a five-line staff in the middle of the system)

• Score where the key signature is only written at the beginning of the first system and not repeated at each system. In these cases, the tonality will be transcribed as “c major”.

• Score that the instruments have different staves sizes: the algorithm is intentionally biased towards thorough analysis of the bigger staff, information about the smaller staff will be lost.

• Staves containing polyphony (several voices written inside of the same staff): rhythm errors are more likely to appear in this configuration.

Here is an example of a PDF that is clean, well scanned, not pixelized, with a distance between the staves, and that is perfectly supported by our LiveScore feature:

Tap here to find out more about the Musical Elements Recognized by our technology