With Lime Aloud, you can navigate through a musical score using standard cursor keys. Your PC plays each note or chord and verbally describes related annotations such as accents, staccato marks, lyrics and ties via the JAWS screen reader software.

Use Lime Aloud to learn new pieces. Play selected sections of any Lime notation file at a practice tempo to facilitate memorization. You can ask Lime Aloud to play a single note, all notes in a particular part, or even all notes in all parts at any given point in the piece.

Lime Aloud can report the current part, voice and staff, current bar and beat, name of current part and more whenever you ask.

Set your desired rhythmic value and then enter the desired pitch or pitches all from your PC keyboard. Optionally connect a musical keyboard to your system and play pieces in tempo to a metronomic pulse. Lime automatically converts what you play into the equivalent musical notation. Print the results for your teacher, your student or your colleague.

Listen to an MP3 audio presentation of Lime Aloud produced by Bill McCann of Dancing Dots, June, 2007. Listen as a blind musician briefly demonstrates how to review musical scores and how to create new ones using Lime with Lime Aloud.

If you want to have all of the features of Lime Aloud plus automatic braille music transcription and real-time braille display support for Lime, check out the latest version of the GOODFEEL Braille Music Translator software from Dancing Dots.

When you order Lime Aloud, you receive it together with the Lime notation editor and the SharpEye Music Reader music OCR software. Before you can study new material using Lime with Lime Aloud, it must be entered into Lime in one of three possible ways: scan print score using SharpEye, import the piece in the form of MusicXML exported from another notation editor such as Sibelius or Finale, or entered directly into Lime by typing and/or playing on a musical keyboard.

SharpEye is an excellent music-scanning software but sooner or later it will make scanning errors. At that point, we need the help of a sighted assistant since we blind musicians cannot see the original print score to determine how to correct the errors. Of course, if we could do that, we probably would not be scanning the music in the first place! That being said, I have often successfully scanned and learned previously unfamiliar pieces using SharpEye independently. That is, it made no errors so I could pass the results to Lime and study the piece by listening and transcribing it to braille music.

Importing MusicXML, which is an emerging standard for notation interchange, promises to be the alternative which will afford blind musicians the maximum level of independence. However, programs that export MusicXML and programs that import it (including Lime itself) still do occasionally make omissions or errors. That being said, I have successfully learned pieces by importing the MusicXML into Lime. But, if you want to be certain that every detail of the print score has been imported, you will need to have a sighted assistant compare the original to what Lime shows on screen and make any necessary corrections. These days, it is extremely rare that notes or rhythms will be incorrectly imported from MusicXML. However, certain other details such as rehearsal markers or finger numbers may still be literally lost in the translation.

Lime does allow you to enter notes, rhythms and all necessary related annotations by typing on your PC keyboard. Adding an electronic, musical keyboard to your workstation vastly improves the ease of entering notes and even allows you to use Lime's Record Dialog to enter notes in tempo to a metronomic pulse.

Lime Aloud System Requirements

In the United States, Dancing Dots is the "Sole Source" for Lime Aloud.

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