"I am not surprised that you have had problems with Song Book with scanning music inacurate results.I had the same problem with Musitek Midi X. Incidently their Tech support is poor as well.I recently installed a new printer.After that Musitek Midi X refused to load and would not work. Upon contacting Tec support.,they replied eventually but could not or would not assist and could not sort the problem.Reply emails were as you say smug and they won't give you a refund.In all fairness the better quality music scanning programs are quite a bit more expensive but probably cheaper in the long run"

"I bought SmartScore Songbook from its manufacturer Musitek as an "upgrade" from SmartScore Lite, which came packaged with Finale PrintMusic (made by a different software manufacturer, MakeMusic). I bought the $99 + shipping upgrade expecting Songbook would serve as a seamless transition from my "raw" music to Finale PrintMusic, which I use to edit and output my music. SmartScore Lite had yielded very poor results scanning printed sheet music, and I hoped for a big improvement with SmartScore Songbook.

After receiving the Songbook package and working through the tutorials in the "Introduction to SmartScore" manual, I tried processing a short PDF file of sheet music I had downloaded from the Internet. But SmartScore Songbook introduced so many errors into the music that I decided it would cost me less time and effort to enter the music note-by-note into PrintMusic, than to clean up the mess presented by SmartScore. This, despite the claim by Musitek, on its web page soliciting the upgrade, that SmartScore can "recognize almost any PDF image including…web-based files." Worse still, every time I’ve tried scanning paper sheet music -- even very clearly printed music -- into SmartScore Songbook, I’ve gotten worthless results, with SmartScore often crashing on my iMac. To top off the disaster, SmartScore Songbook hijacks my interface between sheet music and Finale PrintMusic, substituting itself as the music-editing program and providing no way to export my scanned music into PrintMusic.

I emailed Musitek to complain about the poor processing of the PDF file, attaching a copy of the original file. Several days later Musitek replied that the PDF file I had downloaded from the web was "quite degraded and appears to be dithered (shot full of holes)." They smugly dismissed the inconvenience of all the introduced errors by claiming: "it would take someone familiar with SmartScore’s editor 5-10 minutes to clean up the page..." In my reply, I admitted that the file was degraded on close examination, but argued: "To the human eye…, all the notes, staff lines, beams and slurs in that file are perfectly readable and unambiguous. In light of that situation, it seems to me that your software should be able to convert it to at least 95% accuracy… Since [SmartScore] Songbook has proved worse than useless to me, I want to return this product for a full refund."

Musitek denied my request for a refund on the startling basis that "you were not misled and…the software you have installed continues to function normally." When I filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau, Musitek resorted to its boilerplate legal argument: "Because of its intangible nature, digital software is normally not returnable..." and refused to address the issue of their software frequently crashing on my computer and hijacking my interface to PrintMusic."