Photos, files and recordings

Most people arrive with music that already exists — a photocopied hymnbook page, a file from MuseScore, or a tune in their head. Four ways in.

Photo → score

⋯ → Photo → score. Take a picture, or upload a PDF, and it comes back as an editable score. It reads printed staff notation, handwritten solfa, jianpu and hymnbook pages; multi-page PDFs are handled a page at a time.

Getting good results:

• Fill the frame with the music. Crop out the table, your hand, the facing page.
• Flat and evenly lit. A shadow across the staff costs more accuracy than low resolution does.
• Tell it what it’s looking at if you know — the source-type selector (staff / solfa / jianpu / hymnbook) helps on a difficult page.

Always play it back once. Recognition gets pitches essentially right and is weaker on octave dots and duration underlines — exactly the two things hardest to proofread by eye and easiest to catch by ear.

Import a file

Create → Import MusicXML / MIDI, or drop the file on the window. Accepts .musicxml, .xml, .mxl (zipped) and .mid / .midi.

Staff notation is converted on the way in: DomiSol works out the key and rewrites the pitches as scale degrees, so what you get is real solfa or jianpu rather than a picture of a staff.

MIDI has no concept of a key signature, so a MIDI import is a best guess at the tonic. If the result looks like it’s in the wrong key, it probably is — change the key in the score header and the notation re-spells itself.

Paste notation

Create → Paste notation. If you already have jianpu or solfa as text — in an email, a WhatsApp message, a document — paste it in. Faster than retyping and it handles the common shorthands.

Sing it

Create → Sing to score. Sing or hum with a metronome and get notation back.

Use metronome mode rather than free mode whenever you can: with a known tempo and time signature, the notes are quantised to a real grid and the result needs far less tidying. Wear headphones so the click doesn’t bleed into the microphone.

Group composition extends this to two singers on the same click track, stacking the takes into a duet that lines up bar for bar.

After any import

Whatever the route, you land in the editor with an ordinary score — nothing is locked or marked as imported. Play it against the original once, fix what you hear, and carry on.

Where to go next

• Notes, rhythm and rests — fixing what came back.
• The AI features — what else can act on it.