A flatbed scanner gives the cleanest input: the page is flat, the light is even, and the lens is square to the paper. If you have one, scan at 300 dpi and upload the file.
A phone is what most people have at the music stand, and it works when you help it. The two things that hurt most are perspective and shadow. Shooting at an angle makes staff lines converge, so notes near the far edge sit at the wrong height. A shadow across the page hides note heads and thin lines.
The scanner fixes perspective for you, and you can drag the four corners if the automatic crop misses. Shadows it cannot fix, so move toward a window or turn on a second lamp.
Practicing with a scanned score
Hearing a piece is often the fastest way to learn it. After recognition the scanner opens a practice player: set the speed anywhere from half to full tempo, loop a passage, and turn on the click to lock in the rhythm.
Slow practice works because your hands learn the motion before they learn the speed. Start the loop at a tempo you can play cleanly, then raise it a few percent at a time. The pitch stays the same as you slow down, because the playback is rendered from notes rather than stretched audio.
To keep practicing away from the page, export the MIDI and open it in the MIDI Player, which shows the same notes falling onto a keyboard. If your music is already a PDF on your computer, PDF to MIDI runs the same recognition without the camera step.
What the scanner reads well, and what it doesn’t
Printed notation with clear staff lines is what recognition is built for. Single-line parts, hymns, lead sheets and piano music on a clean page are the friendliest cases.
Crowded pages with many staves, small print, cue notes, or lots of text can trip it up. Handwriting is the weakest case, because every copyist draws symbols differently. When something looks off, listen to the bar, then fix it in your notation app after exporting MusicXML.
Scanning for choirs and ensembles
Choir directors and section leaders can scan a page and hand singers a way to hear their part. Each voice in the recognized score plays back, so a tenor can practice the tenor line against the others at home.
For bands, the scanner pairs well with Transpose Sheet Music. When a part was written for a different instrument, scan it, transpose it for B♭, E♭ or F, and print a part the player can read straight away. Please only scan music you have the right to copy.