No. 489

Measure and Publish the Speed of Scanning-assisted Entry

IWBNI the speed of scanning-assisted entry were measured and published.

The benchmark described in Suggestion 488 could be used for this purpose.

For example, to measure the speed by which music may be entered when the MIDISCAN (or SmartScore) program by Musitek Corp. is used, one could measure the time required to complete the following steps:

  1. Select a given graphics file from the benchmark set.
  2. Import the file into MIDISCAN (or SmartScore).
  3. Edit the file as need with MIDISCAN (or SmartScore).
  4. Save the file in MIDISCAN (or SmartScore) format.
  5. Import the file into Finale by selecting the appropriate item on the File>Import submenu.
  6. Edit the file as needed with Finale until it closely matches the corresponding Finale file that is included with the benchmark which was generated manually without the use of character recognition software.
The time required to complete this process would be added to the published time required to generate the graphics file. This total time would be compared with the published time required to create the manually-generated Finale file.

For an example of a study of this type, see:

Leonard Cecil, "Why I don't scan music" English or "Warum ich keine Noten scanne..." German, published at Swiss-MusicNet.
 


Created: April 27, 2000 (based on comments by Frank N. Barch, Andrew Stiller and J. Allen Fisher)
Last Updated: May 21, 2000 (included reference to study by Leonard Cecil)
Version: Finale 2000b