Need to scan an entire library of over a million sheets of sheet music!

[David Goodrich]

Greetings,
I've collected and am an avid collector of classical sheet music (example: entire piano works of Beethoven). I now wish to scan all I have (possibleover a million pages) into the computer for convenience and storage reasons, and I just saw an article where one can now put that on an iPad and playthe music on the piano from the iPad! I do not own a scanner and need advice on what scanner is best for this project, and how to go about doing theproject. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Further, I've purchased, at a very reasonable price, some discs that contain the entire sheet music of Chopin etc, and it occurs to me that maybe I need a referral to more of that instead? However I'm betting that some of my music isn't availableanywhere in electronic format, and I'll still need to learn how to scan?

Thanks,
David

 

[Charlie Hoffpauir]

Greetings,
I've collected and am an avid collector of classical sheet music (example: entire piano works of Beethoven). I now wish to scan all I have (possible over a million pages) into the computer for convenience and storage reasons, and I just saw an article where one can now put that on an iPad and play the music on the piano from the iPad! I do not own a scanner and need advice on what scanner is best for this project, and how to go about doing the project. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Further, I've purchased, at a very reasonable price, some discs that contain the entire sheet music of Chopin etc, and it occurs to me that maybe I need a referral to more of that instead? However I'm betting that some of my music isn't available anywhere in electronic format, and I'll still need to learn how to scan?

Thanks,
David

Well, over a million sheets means you certainly need a sheet feed
scanner. However, IIRC sheet music paper is usually larger than
standard 8 1/2 x 11 inches. Now you don't say, but I'm assuming you're
in the US where most paper "is" 8 1/2 x 11. I'd suggest you first
determine the paper size you'll be scanning, then look for auto sheet
feed scanners that will handle that size. Example: My Brother MFC will
scan paper as wide as 11 inches... BUT it will only sheet feed paper 8
1/2 inches or less. If letter size will work for you then the Brother
MFC is a good choice. You can set it up to scan to your computer, load
it up and let it go. If you have larger paper than what a sheet fed
scanner will handle, then I'm afraid you're in for a tedious job.
And, if some of the music is bound into books, then you have an
entirely different problem.

 

[Charlie Hoffpauir]

Before you begin, take a look at the collection at imslp.org. It will
probably diminish your project size markedly.

Autofeed is handy but probably everything you have is two sided; if you
autofeed it and then flip the stack over and autofeed it again, you'll
need to spend a lot of time getting the pages in order.

---

Actually, some scanners will auto scan both sides of 2-sided
documents, as will my Brother MFC. Also no problem whatever with
keeping the pages in order.

 

[Bert]

In David

I've collected and am an avid collector of classical sheet music
(example: entire piano works of Beethoven). I now wish to scan all I
have (possible over a million pages) into the computer for convenience
and storage reasons, and I just saw an article where one can now put
that on an iPad and play the music on the piano from the iPad! I do
not own a scanner and need advice on what scanner is best for this
project, and how to go about doing the project.

Over a million pages? You want a service bureau, not a scanner.

One million pages, at 10 seconds a page (extremely unlikely) -> 10
million seconds, or 2777 hours. A normal work year is only 2080 hours.

My first summer job back in the 1960s was at such a service bureau,
except we worked with microfilm, not digital images.

 

[Gernot Hassenpflug]

/../
/../

Autofeed is handy but probably everything you have is two sided; if you
autofeed it and then flip the stack over and autofeed it again, you'll
need to spend a lot of time getting the pages in order.

Plenty of PDF utilities to deal with such problems (I know mostly linux,
but on Windows for sure also).