Turn a photo of sheet music into falling notes
2026-10-13
What NoteComet Pro does with a photo
If you have sheet music and want it as falling notes, you do not have to type it in by hand or learn MusicXML. With NoteComet Pro, take a photo of the page (or upload a PDF), and NoteComet reads the notes off the page and turns them into falling notes you can play along with. It is the same player experience you already know, just with a piece from your own bookshelf.
Pro is $1.99 a month or $19.99 a year, and you get 20 reads a month. If you do not want to subscribe, you can still bring your own MusicXML or MIDI files into NoteComet for free.
How to take a photo that reads cleanly
The reader is good, but it is not magic. Five habits make the difference between a clean read and an afternoon in the fix-it editor.
- Flatten the page. A creased or curling page is the single biggest cause of misreads. Press the page flat under a book for a minute before you photograph it.
- Light it well, evenly. Daylight from the side, not a flash from above. Shadows across the staff are read as notes; glares are read as nothing. Both are wrong.
- Keep the whole page in frame. If the bottom of the page is cut off, the bass clef disappears and the left hand gets misread. Leave a small white border on every edge.
- One page per photo. Do not photograph two pages at once. Two pages in one picture are harder to read.
- Use the highest resolution you have. If your camera lets you choose, pick the largest image size. The reader is more accurate with more pixels to work with.
When the read is wrong
After a read, NoteComet shows your photo line by line next to the music it read. Compare them, and tap a measure number to open that measure in the fix-it editor and correct it. This is part of the workflow, not a failure. Expect the odd bar to need a human eye, more on a busy page.
Two tips for the fix-it editor:
- Go line by line. Check one line of the photo against the line under it before moving on, so nothing slips past.
- Trust your ear. If a bar sounds wrong when you play it, it is wrong in the notes. Open that bar in the editor before you fight your fingering.
Respect copyright
NoteComet reads music. It is your job to make sure the music you read is music you have the right to use. Only read music you own a copy of, or that is in the public domain. Reading a piece does not give you a license to it. The same rules apply as for printing it or photocopying it.
The good news: in the US, music published before 1931 is in the public domain, which is exactly the material the free library on NoteComet is built from. If a piece is in our public-domain library already, you do not need to photograph it; it is already there as falling notes.
PDFs work too
If your piece is already a PDF on your computer, upload the file instead of photographing it. A clean PDF usually reads better than a photo because there is no lighting or perspective in the way. Multi-page PDFs are handled one page at a time, the same as a multi-page photo set.
Try it
Sign up for Pro, take a clean photograph of a piece from your shelf, and watch the read come back. Free MusicXML and MIDI import works without a subscription, so if you have sheet music in those formats already, start there. For pieces already in the public domain, the free library has them in falling notes without the photo step at all.