sheet music on i pad or tablet

[john1509]

hi guys just asking am thinking about putting all my music on a  i pad is it a good idea or should i carry all this sheet music a round? its getting a bit heavy now at my age. also is it easy to set it all up thanks

[Fred Smith]

hi guys just asking am thinking about putting all my music on a  i pad is it a good idea or should i carry all this sheet music a round? its getting a bit heavy now at my age. also is it easy to set it all up thanks

The iPad is the way to go. There are lots of apps which support sheet music. I use Songbook+ by Baum software.

Cheers,
Fred

[Rick D.]

John,

Absolutely get rid of all the books and sheets, iPad is the way to go. I like Fred also use Songbook+.

Rick D.

[EileenL]

I use for score and find it very easy to use and arrange my music in order I want it in. Lot better than carrying heavy books around.

[Oldden]

Forescore or songbook+ or maybe something else. Which is best and which has problems ?. Is one OK for a Genos and not so good for other keyboards. I'm thinking of taking the plunge, but no idea which way to go.

[ton37]

Recently I sold my hard copy collections of sheet music that I had collected over the years. It was also a disadvantage that you sometimes had to buy an entire book for 1 or 2 desired music tracks. It was a 'difficult' and more emotional decision than a practical one. For the money from the sale I bought a (android) tablet ( although lately I've been using my desktop with 2 large monitors) and MobileSheets (Pro). I've only been using digital sheet music for the past 2/3 years.
The advantage of digital sheet music is mainly practical: that 50 kg and 2 meter wide cupboard shelf full of music books is now in/on the tablet of <1 kg and on a USB stick; easy to look up, size of the track easy to adjust for readability, 4 pages side by side, 'auto-flip' easy to annotate. You can optionally connect it to the keyboard so that it automatically loads sheet music when you want to play a song. etc. etc. So.. go digital 
Learning how to use such software is a matter of a few days.

[john1509]

thanks for all the reply's .will i be able to copy all my sheet music i have with these apps to save buying them again? sorry if its a daft question 

[Tony09]

Whichever you decide to go with, the biggest and most time consuming task is digitising your sheet music. These apps don't do that. You must scan or photo each music sheet page and then process it before importing into Songbook, MobileSheets, etc.

It takes time, depending on how you like your digitised sheet music to look, but is definitely worth the time and effort.

I use MobileSheets Pro after using ScanScore and MuseScore.

Tony

[john1509]

thanks tony for the advice. I didn't no i can take a photo in the app then it coverts it for me. i have just purchased a page turner so that will help me when i get the sheet music imported 

[EileenL]

You need to have your music in PDF form and then you can just use Dropbox to transfer it to your I Pad. You can then put it into the order you want to play it and also make up set lists.

[Rick D.]

John,

You can transfer music either by scanning them to PDF format or taking a picture of each page. I have a scanner that scans to PDF. It took my two weeks to scan 1200 songs to PDF.  It's very time comsuming but it is well worth the effort. I took all my books apart by removing the spiral spring and on some it meant cutting off the spine, which I was lucky enough to have a media department at work that had a machine to do this. This makes the scanning process much easier. There are many places to get free PDF's of sheetmusic on the internet, this also saves time. This is one of the better ones. https://sheetmusic-free.com/
I use iTunes to get mine into Songbook+, this is a simple process, but you can also do it the way Eileen suggested, both work easily.

Rick D.

[geoff5798]

I have just started using mobile sheets pro a week ago. I find that the easiest way to scan my documents into the app which I have on my samsung galaxy tablet is to use the freeAdobe Scan app which I have both on my iPhone and Galaxy Tablet. I like it because you can do a perfect crop of the sheet music and it gives the background a nice bright white background. In addition the file it produces is of a very small size maybe only 30-50 kb.From within that app I can upload it to my google drive. Then from within mobile sheets app I can import the scanned image from my google drive. You can also import from dropbox if you have that.

[john1509]

thanks Geoff for the info will let you all no how i get on shortly 

[tomtomsf]

Recently I sold my hard copy collections of sheet music that I had collected over the years. It was also a disadvantage that you sometimes had to buy an entire book for 1 or 2 desired music tracks. It was a 'difficult' and more emotional decision than a practical one.

Hi Ton,
I am thinking about doing the same thing myself and have the same feelings. I was wondering where or how you sold your music and how you priced it? Did you sell the entire collection all together for a nice price? Or did you have to sell off piece by piece?
Tom G

[Rick D.]

I donated all my sheet music to charity. Along with-all my CD's, Records, Cassettes, 8 tracks, and VHS. Everything is digitized and backed up to three places. No need for all the clutter these days.

Rick D.

[ton37]

Hi Ton,
I am thinking about doing the same thing myself and have the same feelings. I was wondering where or how you sold your music and how you priced it? Did you sell the entire collection all together for a nice price? Or did you have to sell off piece by piece?
Tom G

.
H I @Tomtomsf. I was lucky to sell the whole collection to one person. A had made several photo's of the musicbooks an sell them on a second hand market website. The price was about 25% of the prices I found on internetshops. In my advertisement I stated that only the complete colkection was for sale, not selling single sheets. I guess I was lucky to get one buyer. There were enought interest for some collector items as Cliff Richard, Shadows etc. But selling single pieces would be too labourious and not financial interesting. I considered to donate it too, but I didn't know who would be interested in musicbooks? The nowadays musicshools are commercial instituutes and due to corona lot of institutes were closed.

[stephenm52]

I use both unReal book and Songbook}+ from Baum Software.   To a lesser degree I also use Mobile Sheets Pro for my Android tablet and I Korg Pa4x I sometimes play.

One suggestion there are some web sites where you can download PDF sheets of music so you don't have to go thru the process of scanning individual sheets or books.

[franksboard]

i have a ipad pr012.9 and loaded pfd songbooks and using songbook + . my question is what app to get that i can find a song i am looking for from all the books installed,without looking at each book to look for a song wanted .need a app that is able to search these books to locate song

[Fred Smith]

i have a ipad pr012.9 and loaded pfd songbooks and using songbook + . my question is what app to get that i can find a song i am looking for from all the books installed,without looking at each book to look for a song wanted .need a app that is able to search these books to locate song

Why not use the songbook app? It has a search bar.

Cheers,
Fred

[franksboard]

songbook has a search bar and i put name of song and nothing comes up.i am new to using songbook+

[Fred Smith]

songbook has a search bar and i put name of song and nothing comes up.i am new to using songbook+

You have to set up Songbook properly.

You need to create an entry for each song. In the song details page, you identify the page(s) in the book that the song is on.

Will take you a little while, but the effort will be worth it.

Fred