Google Play, what is it any good for?

[BopEuph]

I'm a young whippersnapper, but I don't want to blow all my money on apps, either. I've bought a handful of games, but there were some apps I just had to have. You may or may not need them in your gigging setup, but here you go:

1.) iReal Pro: A digital fakebook reader. You have to download the song packs, and this app has saved my rear on genres of all types.
2.) MobileSheets Pro: "ForScore" for Android. You can make PDFs of your music and organize them into a tablet. Not a "must-have" if you're not a technophile, but man, do I love never having to worry about grabbing the wrong book any more. Or flipping pages. Or stand lights. Or extra weight of a big book. I now use it on over 90% of my gigs; the only ones I won't go out of my way for are ones where the stand lights are controlled by FOH.
3.) iGigBook: Much like MobileSheets, but not as good. But there is one priceless feature for jazz musicians, though: If you own a pdf copy of your fakebooks, it already has the pages of close to 100 of them catalogued. So all you have to do is load the file, tell the app which book it is, and you can search for tunes like Google.

As for movies, you can rent or buy. The prices will reflect one or the other. I'm not sure if you can do this through Google Play, but you might try to buy a subscription of Netflix first.

[BopEuph]

MobileSheets is the Android version of ForScore. So, unless you have an iPad or iPhone, you can't get it.

By the way, a free app that's perfect for use with these music reading apps is called Genius Scan. It uses your phone camera to "scan" documents and save them as PDF. Modern phones are better resolution than most consumer grade scanners these days. The free version allows you to email the document to yourself, but the paid version will allow you to move it via cloudsharing (which email is usually more stable, so I don't need to pay). So generally, if I'm handed hard-copy music, there's two ways I traverse this:

If I get it in advance:

1.) "Scan" with Genius scan.
2.) Email to myself.
3.) Download it to my computer, edit out any inconsistencies with Adobe Acrobat.
4.) Upload it to my tablet via Dropbox or OneDrive.

If I don't get it in advance, I just skip step 3. I still email the document to myself so I have a backup file.

I got proficient with MobileSheets while doing a tech run of a new orchestral reduction of Ragtime* that was going through numerous rewrites during tech week. You can do a whole lot with the app, but it takes some tinkering to figure out how to do certain things. That was probably the most intense I'll ever use the app, unless I open a brand new show, so I think I figured out most of what I needed in about two weeks.

*The new orchestration of Ragtime drops the euphonium and uses tuba/double bass now. While it's sad, at least it's a reason I'll get a better chance of being called, since tuba/euph players are more prevalent these days than tuba/bass doublers.

EDIT: By the way, black professional music stands are the perfect backdrop when scanning music with Genius Scan. The app might get lucky to determine the edges of the music, but you'll typically have to manually set the corners of the page. It's easier to see if you have a high contrast background, like a music stand or dark table. Also, stacking music is a bad idea, because you won't be sure if you're marking the corner of the page you're working on or the page behind it.

But once you "enhance" the image to black and white it looks great. I've taken color scanned copies of music I've been sent and ran them through the app, to take out the yellow paper color, which doesn't look good on screen OR print in black and white; and the app does a great job of getting rid of the ink that bleeds through from the back of the page.