Tablets for music?

[rsanbornmorgan]

If you use a tablet for loading and reading music, what do you use? At a recent conference I saw about half the performers with a tablet on their stand instead of printed music.

Thanks for any thoughts.

[Donn]

There are, of course, foot operated page changers, but there are also a couple that will just do it for you - they listen, and wait for you to get to the end of the page. E.g., Autoflip. I guess that would be mostly useful for solo performance.

[Three Valves]

What does the International Brotherhood of Page Turners have to say about this Voodoo??

[Dan Schultz]

I've given some thought to buying one. If I do... it will have to be the same size as regular music.

I wonder how the copyright police are dealing with the fact that one has to scan the music in. I know Finale just dropped their scanning capability because of this.

[Wyvern]

I have used tablet for nearly all my music playing for the last 3 years. Never want to go back to paper music. No trouble reading when seated at back of dark stage, or music blowing away during outdoor gigs. Using foot page turner is also invaluable when playing front valve tuba where I can't turn page without stopping playing otherwise. Also I have all my music with me all the time available to practice.

I bought a 12.9" iPad Pro as soon as they were available. For music I use ForScore app and now have over 1,500 scores loaded. Where once I was fumbling around looking for part in folder and usually the last to find, I am now one of the first ready to play. Any new pieces handed out I immediately scan with my iPad using ScannerPro app. Annotations during rehearsal are made using the Apple Pencil. For page turning I use AirTurn PED.

All in all it works for me. Never once has the iPad let me down.

[rsanbornmorgan]

Thanks, Wyvern, for your detailed reply. Just what I was looking for. Now, I wonder if anyone uses a similar-sized android tablet for the same?

[opus37]

A lot to the rock band player in church have gone to the iPad for their music. They also use the same software and accessories as noted previously. Some use the smaller iPads, but you really need good eye for that. To be ready to go, you need to spend a little time prior to your practice or gig to assemble your music into a play list. Not a big deal, but you need to do it. Also, most have gone to special stands for holding the iPad. Just placing them on a regular stand works, but it not very secure. I still like paper. What works best for me is a 3 ring binder with clear plastic page protectors. I mostly play horns with upright valves so page turning is not an issue.

[tubapix]

this looks amazing, but it's expensive

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXNQ310 ... e=youtu.be" target="_blank" target="

WOW! That is SWEET! Great size and you can annotate too.
$1600 + tax & shipping seems a bit much for me.
Seems great for the professional though.

[Wyvern]

The GVIDO looks nice, but apart from displaying double page spread, I can't see it provides any facilities more than a 12.9" iPad Pro loaded with suitable app which costs far less and can be used for hundreds of other things in addition to displaying music scores

[bort]

The GVIDO looks like the old-school Amazon Kindle, which seeks to mimic the paper experience as closely as possible. I think the biggest advantages for either of those is the lack of glare/reflection, and the improved contrast.

I don't like much about the iPad to begin with, and don't like it in this application either -- I've tried it, and just didn't enjoy the experience at all. If I was somehow forced to abandon paper music for an iPad, I could probably learn to make it work... but I'm sure I would complain a lot about it.

[MaryAnn]

Sure could have used one Tuesday when I had a last minute opportunity to play 2nd horn on Beethoven 7th, one of my very favorite 2nd horn parts. Imslp multiple pages taped together into one very loooooooong sheet that created mayhem when I tried to get enough pages visible so I didn't have a quick turn in the middle of something that should not have a quick turn.
The one tablet I've seen was being used by a trumpet player in a reading session, and the notes on it were so small I didn't see how he could possibly read it. I don't now how page turns worked because I was busy enough reading my own part.

Given the price and the release date in the future, I think waiting two years would be a huge advantage in all respects.

[Mark]

The GVIDO looks nice, but apart from displaying double page spread, I can't see it provides any facilities more than a 12.9" iPad Pro loaded with suitable app which costs far less and can be used for hundreds of other things in addition to displaying music scores

Yes. If the GVIDO were One-fourth of the current price, I would buy one. But it's not.

[Mark]

me...buy a tablet...?? nah. I'd drop-and-break it, or forget and leave it somewhere. Paper works OK.

I'm paranoid. If I had a tablet, I'd also take the paper.

[Rick F]

The one plus side of using a tablet is that it's backlit.

But for me, I think paper and pencil is just fine. Some things are hard to improve on.

[TubaDude]

Good Day All;

I picked up a 17 inch Dell 2 in 1 with the reading of sheet music as one of the purposes to justify the purchase. It has a wicked fast processor, killer graphics, mega disk space and ram, and to boot you can fold the keyboard back behind the screen and turn the device into a portrait mode tablet touch enabled to flip between the pages of the piece you're playing. The computer was about 1200 last year, but they've come down a bit since then. I also use the machine for software development and other stuff so it's a worthwhile investment for me.

[tclements]

I been using the large iPad. Once you learn the tricks, it's pretty cool, ESPECIALLY in low light conditions. I bought a pedal, but haven't worked with it, yet. A friend of mine (who is an iPad MONSTER), is going to put out a series of YouTubes with 'tips & tricks.'

[Three Valves]

When I play for more than an hour my wife's tablet of choice is Excedrin!!

[Rick F]

Once I have the pdf pages saved to desktop, I use the free program "PDFTK Builder" (pdf task builder). Just add the pages, sort, then 'save as'.

Link: http://download.cnet.com/PDFTK-Builder/ ... 98814.html

[gwwilk]

Thanks for the great information in this thread, especially you, Schlepporello. I decided to go the whole nine yards and get a Galaxy View from Amazon. It arrived yesterday along with my PageFlip Butterfly and an FYY case.

The View is huge! I wasn't aware that there's no way to rotate the screen into Portrait mode--if there is I haven't discovered it yet. This just means that the View sits horizontally on the stand. BUT with MobileSheets Pro I eventually learned how to display two pages simultaneously.

MobileSheets Pro is an amazing program that automatically crops the scanned images, PDF's in my case, to maximize the size of the sheets. It's incredibly fast and has a multitude of options I haven't begun to explore. I did set the sheets to 'sepia' rather than 'white'. It took me a while to understand that 'Overlay' meant the music display menu and I had to use the MobileSheets Setting to set a double tap on the View as the Overlay display mode before I could get it to come up so that I could use the two-page display feature.

I used a Canon Pixma MX920 Series all-in-one to scan in the music. Only after loading the images onto the View did I discover that a couple of the pieces had the bottom line cut off in scanning. Setting the Canon scan-size to 'Auto' rather than 'Letter' solved that problem.

I just need to place the stand about a foot or so closer to me when using the View and the music is very visible with my old eyes. Now I need to get a bearer to help lug all my stuff to-and-fro.

[gwwilk]

Oh yeah!
By the way, the View only displays in the portrait position. I've experimented with a couple of apps that promised auto-rotate possibilities, but they failed miserably. Maybe an app with a forced rotate would work if there is such an animal.

I think you mean 'Landscape', not 'Portrait', Schlepp. Landscape is longest horizontally and Portrait is longest vertically. I've found no way to rotate the View's display either. I'll bet we've tried the same apps.