Scan and import sheet music from a PDF or photo
Turn a PDF, scan, or photo of sheet music into a fully editable score.
Flat uses AI-powered optical music recognition (OMR) to read the music printed on the page and rebuild it as real notation you can play, transpose, arrange, and share. You bring the sheet music, Flat does the typing.
How it works
- Start a new score and choose to import a PDF (or, on the Flat mobile app, take a photo).
- Flat scans each page and recognizes the staves, notes, and symbols.
- Your music opens as a fully editable score. Press play to hear it right away, then review, edit, transpose, and arrange.
Capture from your phone
On the Flat mobile app for iOS and Android, you can photograph sheet music directly inside the app instead of importing a file.
The in-app camera usually gives better results than a regular photo from your camera app: Flat uses dedicated on-device document scanning that automatically finds the page, crops it, and flattens the image before sending it for recognition. A cleaner capture means a cleaner conversion.
What Flat can read
Flat's OMR is built for standard Western music notation that has been engraved: music typeset by notation software or professionally printed. That covers most sheet music, method books, parts, and lead sheets.
Works well
- Printed or digitally engraved sheet music, including scans and photos of printed pages
- Solo parts, piano and other grand-staff music, and multi-instrument scores
- Lead sheets with chord symbols
Not supported
- Handwritten or hand-copied music
- Tablature (guitar/bass tab), not yet supported
- Pages with no standard notation (text-only pages, lyrics-only sheets, cover pages)
Which notations are supported?
Within engraved Western notation, Flat recognizes a wide range of symbols, including:
| Category | What Flat recognizes |
|---|---|
| Clefs | Treble (G), bass (F), alto and tenor (C) in all positions, octave-shifted clefs (e.g. treble 8va/8vb, bass 8vb), and percussion clefs, including clef changes within a piece |
| Key signatures | All key signatures, from 7 flats to 7 sharps |
| Time signatures | Any numerator from 1 to 24; denominators of 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, and 32; plus common time and cut time |
| Note values | Whole, half, quarter, 8th, 16th, 32nd, 64th, 128th, 256th, 512th, and 1024th notes, as well as breve, long, and maxima; with augmentation dots |
| Rests | Regular rests and multi-measure rests |
| Tuplets | Triplets and other ratios (for example 3:2, 2:3, 5:4, 6:4, 7:4, 7:8, 9:8, and more) |
| Beams | Standard beams, including partial beams, hooks, custom beaming patterns, and beams across rests |
| Pitches | The full pitch range, including ledger lines |
| Chords & voices | Chords, and multiple voices on a single staff |
| Accidentals | Sharp, flat, natural, double sharp, double flat, courtesy (cautionary), and microtonal (quarter-tone) accidentals |
| Ties & slurs | Ties and slurs |
| Grace & cue notes | Grace notes and acciaccatura, plus cue (small) notes |
| Dynamics | ppp, pp, p, mp, mf, f, ff, fff, plus sf, sfz, fz, fp, pf, rfz, sfp, sfpp, and sffz |
| Hairpins | Crescendo and decrescendo hairpins |
| Articulations | Staccato, staccatissimo, tenuto, accent, marcato (strong accent), detached legato, soft accent, spiccato, stress and unstress, breath marks, caesuras, and jazz marks (doit, falloff, plop, scoop) |
| Ornaments | Trill, mordent, inverted mordent, turn, inverted turn, delayed turn, vertical turn, shake, schleifer, Haydn ornament, and wavy line |
| Tremolos | Single-note tremolos and between-note tremolos (1 to 4 strokes) |
| Fermatas | Fermatas |
| Arpeggios | Arpeggios |
| Glissandos & slides | Glissandos and slides |
| Octave lines | 8va, 8vb, 15ma, and 15mb |
| Tempo | Metronome marks (with BPM) and gradual changes (rit. and accel.) |
| Barlines | Normal, double, final, repeat (start and end), and heavy-light barlines |
| Repeats & navigation | Repeat endings / voltas (1st through 8th), Segno, Coda, Da Capo, Dal Segno, To Coda, and Fine |
| Measure repeats | Single-bar repeats (%) and rhythm slashes |
| Noteheads | Standard, X, circle-X, cross, diamond, triangle, inverted triangle, square, slash, slashed, back-slashed, and hidden noteheads |
| Multi-staff instruments | Piano and other grand-staff instruments (up to 7 staves) |
| Percussion | Percussion staves and noteheads |
| Chord symbols | Chord symbols and chord charts, recognized as editable chords, not just text |
| Harmonics | Natural and artificial harmonics |
| Performance techniques | Fingerings, up-bow and down-bow, snap pizzicato, stopped notes, open strings, and thumb position |
| Pedal | Sustain pedal down, up, and change |
| Text & lyrics | Lyrics, rehearsal marks, and text annotations |
Latin-script languages (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and more) are recognized by default. Lyrics in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Cyrillic-script languages (Russian, Ukrainian, and Bulgarian) are recognized based on your account language and the regions where those languages are spoken.
Getting the best results
If it's hard for a human to read, it will be hard for Flat to read too. The cleaner and sharper your source, the better the conversion.
Recognition suffers most from:
- Low-resolution or blurry files
- Bent, warped, or curved staves (common when photographing a book near the spine)
- Faint, partially erased, or heavily marked-up notation
- Scanning artifacts, shadows, or skewed and rotated pages
- Scores where the number of staves changes from one system to the next
Also import a single piece per file, so Flat doesn't try to merge unrelated staves: keep one instrument per file for a solo part, and don't combine a full score and its separate instrument parts in the same file.
We improve recognition regularly. See the latest PDF & photo scanning updates.