Digital Music Tools & Software

[Sara Hood]

I know several musicians who have switched over to using a tablet computer for storing and displaying their sheet music. I think that I want to join that crowd (me too -itis). I am not sure that I want to line Apple's already full pocket book. They seem to be the most expensive tablet out there, but they are highly regarded for this kind of use. So I thought I would check in here to get the lay of the digital landscape.

Do you use a tablet or paper to store and display music?

What brand/model do you use? What size do you use (dimensions)?

What software do you use to organize and manage your digital sheet music, sound, and/or other music related files?

Which apps and/or tablet accessories do you recommend to fellow musicians?

Your opinions relating to all things tablets and music making/playing (but not sound editing/mixing) please (smile).

- Sara

[RickF]

When I use my tablet (iPad) for music display I use "For Score". I've had it for about 6 years or more. It's very powerful where you can edit, highlight, make notes and have a pedal to turn pages if you desire. Pretty sure it's available for IOS and Android. When I bought it it was $5. BUT, with my failing eyesight I've gone back to paper. Sometimes it's hard to improve on paper and pencil. If I had a iPad Pro with a larger screen I'd probably use it more. One benefit is its back light so you don't need a stand light in dimly lighted environment.

[davewerden]

I have thought about it, but don't want to spring for an iPad Pro - I'm sure the larger screen would be 100% necessary for me.

A foot pedal to turn pages would be a nearly-necessary accessory.

Assuming I were playing from PDF files that I possess, I'd be pretty OK with it. I always allow for future years when software/hardware changes may come along and make special files unusable. But if I have a PDF of everything I could print it whenever I needed to.

[davewerden]

Here is a case in point for not wanting to rely totally on "stuff" that is out of my hands:

https://thenextweb.com/cars/2019/09/...-app-was-down/

Totally different scenario, but there is a common thread in there somewhere.

[Euph2015]

Hello All,
I have been considering some type of electronic reader as of late. Regardless of the manufacture (Apple $$$$$ or a Windows $$ or more, options dependent(memory, interfaces and etc)). After reading the above comments I am leaning toward paper and pencil. I am retired and my budget has its' limits.
Having to deal with eyesight issues as well. My solution to schlepping around fifteen plus pounds of paper is to put together a performance book. It fits in a 1 & 1/2 in loose leaf binder/notebook. (prefer D Rings as opposed to others). I have been know to use the enlargement function on my printer/copier occasionally (115% works fairly well). My church ministries asked me to play for retirement homes and rehab facilities every other week. I have asked the residents and staff what type of music they would like to hear. So I have those tunes ready when I return. Using a foldable two wheel cart to haul my Euphonium, a stand, a light, and elbow pad all in one bag it works for me. For what it is worth my Euphonium with case weighs in at twenty pounds. I do play with a band (Energy City New Horizons (shameless plug)) and there is no requirement to haul the entire library. We only work music for the next performance. One after thought if you are not comfortable with the MS Windows PC environment would suggest researching Apple products. Also regardless of what platform you might choose your library will have to scanned into PDF file format. That task is dependent on the amount of music you want/need to put on the tablet / reader.
Keeping a table charged up and ready for use is a requirement. There are ancillary support things that come with any technology be it a pencil sharpener or a back up power source (extension cord and charger unit)

[davewerden]

Good points above. One should also think about the fact that some sheet music won't scan on a typical home unit of the music is oversize. That can add a pesky barrier to getting the job done.

[ghmerrill]

Good points above. One should also think about the fact that some sheet music won't scan on a typical home unit of the music is oversize. That can add a pesky barrier to getting the job done.

This is a good thing to keep in mind, and I'm loathe to make generalizations (particularly not knowing what sort of printers/scanners people "typically" have), but I don't think I've encountered a problem with this over the past 10 years of scanning in all kinds of (sometimes quite elderly) sheet music from several community bands. The oversize stuff can be irritating, but with some care I've always managed to get it scanned so that when I print it out, it at least displays on a standard (American) 8.5"x11" letter-size sheet.

My printer/scanner (which we've had for some years now) is a Canon PIXMA MX880 (now superseded by other similar models). For oversize music, I SCAN it as A4 size, and then PRINT it as "letter" size with the setting to "shrink to page". At times this requires careful placement of the page on the scanner bed (with edges just a bit off the bed), can involve some trial and error (), and may result in some of the "publication information" (usually at the bottom of the first page) not making it onto the scanned image (which I save as a PDF). But with a bit of care and patience, even fairly large sheet music is scanable in this way. You could otherwise scan it in as even some larger format, but A4 seems to work in general and to have good relative height/width dimensions. Of course, when you print it out on letter-size paper, there is some reduction in size of the text and music notation, but this is minimal and unproblematic. Or, of course, you could always buy A4 paper and print it on that -- but then it won't fit into a standard American 3-ring binder ().

Anyhow ... this approach has been working for me for quite a while. I suspect that most people who have printers/scanners have one with similar capabilities.

[ghmerrill]

While in the abstract I very much like the idea of using some sort of tablet for displaying my sheet music, and playing from it, as a practical matter my own feeling is that the current technology is not sufficiently baked for me to move in that direction. It's pretty tricky (from my own point of view and for my own goals/needs) to find a "tablet" that is (a) capable of providing a sufficiently large display, (b) reasonably affordable, and (c) supports all the interactive and display features that would make it worthwhile. I'm also a bit (well, more than a bit) uneasy with plopping a $1,000 (or more) tablet on my music stand in a crowded community band environment and leaving it as a target of opportunity for any French horn, trumpet, percussion, or woodwind player who's barging past to get to his seat. My current (Lenovo X11) tablet/dual purpose system would WORK, but the display isn't quite as large as I'd want, and I definitely don't want to put my primary system at risk.

There are (as I've mentioned in other threads somewhere) some more "special purpose" tablets being developed for use in "professional" (orchestra/band/solo) settings. But currently these are prohibitively expensive for "normal" people, still in development, and only beginning to be used by professional organization. However, until the features/capabilities/costs of those meet my criteria, I'm not inclined to go with what I regard as half-baked solutions. So likely in my playing lifetime I'm going to be using paper -- which is NOT bad and offers some advantages.

A remaining problem with digital display devices for music is that the typically imagined usage scenario is of a group of musicians in a band or orchestra or other ensemble playing in an indoor concert environment. But what about those outdoor concert venues which are subject to wind, rain, and intense sunlight (which will render the image on your screen virtually invisible)? Not so good. So -- again from my perspective -- not only does the current digital solution fail to be adequate in some important respects in the typically expected environments, but the solution fails to be a general one (use it anywhere). For now, it's still the case that paper and trees rule. I am Groot.

[miketeachesclass]

I've been fully digital for music reading for about 2.5 years at this point. I use the 12.9" iPad pro, as it's approximately the same size as a standard 8.5x11" sheet of paper.

I was concerned at first about bluetooth dropouts, battery life, etc, but I don't even carry paper music on stage as a backup anymore.

I will say that it's incredibly nice to be able to relentlessly mark music up without damaging original copies, including multiple colors, etc. This has been very helpful for me.

I don't use a traditional flatbed scanner, but use an app on the iPhone/iPad called genius scan to quickly scan pages. It takes a steady hand, but works well, even for music that is not a standard size. Of course, if you scan a sheet that's larger than 8.5x11, the resulting display is smaller than the actual sheet of paper, so there can occasionally be difficulty there. I've never felt it to be obnoxious though.

As Dave indicated, I always use PDF files, as I would be in trouble if for some reason a proprietary file format rendered something unusable.

As always, YMMV.

[djwpe]

I’ve been all digital for probably 8 years. I started with an iPad 1, and I’m on the latest iPad Pro now. With the Apple Pencil and forScore, it’s faster and easier to annotate, and the annotations in color make it easy for me. For solos it’s great, because you can annotate the crap out of it.

For band playing, the foot pedal is needed, for orchestra, not so much.

3 ensembles I play with now are all digital, so I would have to print anyway. Phone based scanning apps are so good now, I got to an outdoor performance I was subbing in, and within 10 minutes I had scanned and uploaded the rep, and didn’t need to fiddle with stand lights or wind clips.

In my 8 years using this system, I have not had a failure of any kind that put me out of a rehearsal or a performance. I highly recommend it.

Don Winston

[bbocaner]

I've been using an ipad for music since the ipad 2 came out, 2011ish? I guess about the same amount of time as Don. I don't use it for every gig, as sometimes paper is still easier for me, but especially on those gigs where there is a big fat folder stuffed with music, I find it to be a huge time saver.

I currently use the 12.9" ipad pro which is really nice. If you crop very carefully you can get away with the smaller screen without making it a whole lot smaller than the original paper copy, but it's so much easier with the larger screen. The apple pencil is also really nice.

Tips - I don't like putting a bunch of other apps on the ipad I'm using for music. I don't want notifications or battery drain or instability from anything else while I am trying to play a concert. Airplane mode and then re-enable bluetooth so you don't have any wifi or cellular connection but you do have bluetooth connected for the pedal. I also turn off automatic updates. Forscore is great but it has had a number of bugs over the years which have been showstoppers. You don't want it updating right before a concert and either changing the behavior or introducing a new bug. Only update when you have a chance to test before you actually have to use it.

I used 3 or 4 different variants of the airturn pedal before I settled on the firefly pedal from pageflip. I like the feel of the pageflip pedal better and it seems to be more reliable about connecting to bluetooth.

[Sara Hood]

So Mike, a further question if I may. I have not sprung for the tablet yet. But I did get a brand spankin' new smart phone. I was wondering if you (or anyone else on the forum, for that matter) could recommend a metronome app, a tuner app, or any other "good to have app" for the hobby-ist musician's smart phone.
- Sara

[adrian_quince]

My go to tuner is Tunable: https://tunable.affinityblue.com/

It displays pitch as a graph, rather than just using a needle. It's enlightening to see how pitch can change over the life of a note.

The metronome in Tunable is good enough if you just need something to provide a steady click. If you're looking for something more advanced, Tempo is fantastic: http://www.frozenape.com/tempo-metronome.html

My favorite feature of Tempo is the ability to have complex meters (5/8, 7/8, etc) click the correct subdivisions.

Both apps are available on iOS and Android.

[miketeachesclass]

So Mike, a further question if I may. I have not sprung for the tablet yet. But I did get a brand spankin' new smart phone. I was wondering if you (or anyone else on the forum, for that matter) could recommend a metronome app, a tuner app, or any other "good to have app" for the hobby-ist musician's smart phone.
- Sara

I use Tonal Energy as a tuner - it's nice because it will allows for both equal temperament and just intonation. For playing with drones, that can be helpful.

As a metronome, I use "Tempo", although there are a million apps. I also use a Dr. Beat (DB88) when I can to avoid using the phone.

[bbocaner]

Tonal energy has a bug which makes it difficult to use in just intonation (or meantone, or anything other than equal). It calculates all the frequencies from where "C" is rather than from where "A" is. So, for example - if you set the calibration at A440 and then you try to tune an "A" in a C just scale, that A will be actually 436hz rather than 440. It should really calculate everything based off your calibration note rather than where C in equal temperament would be relative to the calibration note. You can compensate by shifting your calibration note, but it requires you understand what's happening.