Recently I needed to import a bunch of PDFs of sheet music into Logic Pro X to make a remix for a project. I ended up having to basically just make a MIDI from scratch. This isn’t the first time I’ve come across this either. There are tons of MIDI collections of popular songs but there are even larger collections of sheet music PDFs out there. I’ve often found that the sheet music PDFs are more often than not, more correct and comprehensive than the MIDI version which sometimes takes short cuts, has wrong notes or is in a totally different key than the original.

I found that ScanScore is an excellent tool to help with this. I was actually impressed at how well it works. You can scan sheet music you have written or import a PDF or other image file you’ve gotten off the Internet. Once it’s scanned you can see the original vs the scanned version. If it gets a note wrong on occasion, you can just fix it up in the scan version which is basically an active playable piano roll just like you’d see in your DAWs. You can play the whole song to see how it was translated, and it has a nice piano sample actually, sounds fairly accurate for a program that’s focus is not outputting sound.

You can also do things like shift keys and change tempo, add notes ect. It most reminds me of editing in an old windows program called Noteworthy Composer I used in the 90s (this is a complement, Noteworthy was awesome!). Once you’ve gotten it cleaned up, you can export to MIDI or Music XML. ScanScore is not infallible however, I tried some complex classical music, and got some crazy mishmash of notes. It actually could still play it though, which was impressive. However, my success rate trying various PDFs was pretty good. Overall its a great tool for importing the occasional thing you need in a PDF format.

Created in DosBox over about two hours. Lost the early creation footage but it was not very interesting.

Gamechops has long since established itself as the go-to label for awesome video game remixes. Dj Cutman’s crew has just released the extensive and polished Spindash 2. With tracks spanning the entire Sonic the Hedgehog franchise, you really get your moneys worth with this collection. Stand out tracks, in my personal opinion is Blind’s remix of Starlight (my all time favorite Sonic song) and Chjolo’s Totally Rad from Sonic Adventure 2. There is not a bad track on the album and I particularly like how they were able to breathe life into songs that have been remixed many times – especially those from the original Sonic the Hedgehog. Grab this album today.

Celebrating the 30 year anniversary of the Legend of Zelda, two programmers have created a WebGL 3D recreation of the Legend of Zelda. This is not a quick, cheap redo in 3D, it is incredibly faithful to the original and very polished graphically.

The fact that its all been done in Java script and you can play it right in your browser is also pretty awesome. Literally, just go to this page and you can play it. The controls are responsive and it really feels like the original. Enjoy.