Install & use · 繁體中文
Pdf2Score
Turn PDF sheet music into files MuseScore can open. Drag a PDF in, every page is recognised, and multi-page scores are stitched into one piece.
Before you start
Four things to check. If they all hold, carry on.
- Mac model
- Either kind Apple Silicon and Intel have separate installers, and the wrong one will not open. Apple menu → About This Mac, look at the Chip row.
- System version
- macOS 14 or later Same window. Sonoma, Sequoia and Tahoe all work.
- Also needed
- MuseScore You will open and proofread the results in it. Free download.
- Internet
- Not needed Recognition runs on your own machine; no score is uploaded anywhere.
Download
The two installers are for different machines, and the wrong one will not open. Apple menu → About This Mac, look at the “Chip” or “Processor” row.
Install
The warning in step 3 is expected, and does not mean anything is wrong with the file — this app has no paid Apple certificate, so macOS blocks it once by default. You only have to do this the first time.
-
Open the .dmg you downloaded
Double-click it in your Downloads folder. A window opens: drag Pdf2Score onto the Applications folder beside it.
Drag to install. Once you let go the copy is done and you can close the window. -
Open it from Applications with a right-click
Do not double-click for this first launch. Right-click Pdf2Score (or Control-click it) and choose Open from the menu.
Only the first launch needs this. After that, double-clicking works normally. -
Click Open in the warning dialog
You will see something like “Apple could not verify … it may contain malware”. Click Open.
If the dialog only offers “Move to Trash” and “Cancel”, with no Open:
Click Cancel, then open System Settings → Privacy & Security and scroll to the bottom. A line says Pdf2Score was blocked — click Open Anyway next to it and enter your password.
That line only appears after you have tried to open the app, at the bottom of the page. -
That's it
The app opens to an empty window, waiting for PDFs. Nothing to configure, no account, no download to wait for — everything it needs is already inside.
Converting a score
Three moves: drop it in, press Convert, open the result in MuseScore.
Drag PDFs into the window
As many at once as you like, or a whole folder — it finds every PDF inside. The Add PDFs button in the toolbar does the same thing.
Press Convert
About 5 seconds per page on Apple Silicon (around 15 with Audiveris); Intel Macs are slower again. You can press Stop at any time. One file failing does not affect the others — that row turns red and the rest carry on.
Open the result in MuseScore
Each PDF produces an .mxl of the same name
in the folder the PDF came from. Double-click it to open
it in MuseScore, or right-click the row and choose Show in Finder.
Two recognition engines
When a result comes out badly, switch engines before you touch anything else — it helps more than any setting.
homr (default)
A neural model. Copes better with photographs, skewed scans and soft printing. A little faster.
Audiveris
Classical structural analysis. Very steady on clean, regularly engraved scores, and it reads multi-page pieces as one book itself. A little slower.
How to switch
The engine switch is in the toolbar, right next to Convert. Pick one before converting.
For a file that has already been converted, right-click its row → Re-recognise with …. That runs the same PDF through the other engine and writes a second file, so you can compare them.
Neither is always better. On the same score the two may differ by a bar or two, or by a lot — compare them and decide which one to proofread.
Everything needs proofreading
Optical music recognition is never perfect. That is the state of the technology, not a fault in this app. Cleanly printed scores usually come out well; skewed scans, repeated photocopies, handwriting and dense piano writing produce noticeably more wrong notes and rhythms.
Think of it as having typed most of the notes for you. Check it against the original in MuseScore and fix what is wrong — still far faster than entering the whole thing by hand.
Settings
The defaults are fine; these are the ones you might want to change. Open them from Pdf2Score → Settings in the menu bar.
Location
By default results land next to the source PDF. To collect everything in one place, switch to “A folder I choose”.
Use the Apple GPU
Only meaningful on Apple Silicon; leave it off on Intel. The first run has to compile the model, so it pays off across many files rather than one.
Rendering resolution
300 dpi by default. If a scan looks soft, 400 dpi may read it better, at the cost of speed; 200 dpi is faster when you are in a hurry.
Merge multi-page PDFs
On by default: one PDF, one file. If a page's part layout does not line up with the others, it writes the pages out separately and flags the row rather than forcing together a score that would be wrong.
If something goes wrong
Double-clicking does nothing, or it says the app is damaged and should be moved to the Trash
That is how macOS treats an app without a paid Apple certificate; the file itself is fine. Follow install steps 2 and 3: right-click → Open, or System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway.
The first conversion is very slow, or it sits on “Starting the recognition engine”
On the first launch after installing, macOS checks every file inside the app. This one bundles two complete recognition engines, so there are a lot of files and that check can take several minutes. It only happens once. “Starting the recognition engine…” in the queue means it is working, not stuck.
Leave the app open for a moment and it finishes this in the background; conversions after that run at normal speed.
Normal speed is about 5 seconds per page (around 15 on Intel).
One file turned red and failed
Click that row and the Processing log below it expands with the reason. The two common ones:
No noteheads found — the page may be a cover, a table of contents or a lyrics page, or the scan may be too faint. The whole file failed — check the PDF really is sheet music and not a heavily compressed image scan.
Trying again at 400 dpi is worth a shot.
A multi-page piece came out as several files
When one page is recognised with a different number of parts than the others (a page misread as two staves, say), forcing them together would produce a garbled score, so the pages are written out separately and the row is flagged.
You can join them by hand in MuseScore, or change the resolution and try again to see whether that page reads correctly.
The result has a lot of errors
Start with the quality of the PDF. A photograph or a low-resolution scan makes a large difference — get a cleaner copy if you can. Skewed scans can be straightened in Preview first.
If the original is already clean and the result is still poor, that score is beyond what the current engines handle. Try the other engine before giving up.
MuseScore will not open the .mxl
Check you have MuseScore 4 (musescore.org,
free). .mxl is the standard compressed MusicXML format, so
Sibelius, Finale and Dorico read it too.
Does converting upload my scores anywhere?
No. The recognition models and both engines are inside the app; everything happens on your machine and no network connection is needed at any point.