On Mon, 24 May 2004, Bruce Petherick wrote: > At 12:15 PM 22/05/2004, you wrote: > > >Any listers have personal experience with this device? > > Did anyone reply? I _so_ want one. We were discussing this type of machine > at a gig a couple of months ago. The fantasy was to put the real book into > a palm-type device so that we could instantly transpose something, as well > as having a reference for those tunes that "fall out of the repetoire". > This device is so much better, but more expensive, of course.
I responded privately, but I'll reply to the list. I've had one for a little over a year. The biggest hassle, if it is really a hassle, is getting the music into the thing. It is easy to do, but with hundreds or thousands of titles, it takes time. It reads any graphics format file (png, jpg, gif, tif, and more). Simply get your music into one of those formats and import it into the unit. Highlights: All your music in one location. It uses a USB flash memory stick for storage. It came with a 64Meg one but I bought a 128 to supplement it and I think I have a little over 700 titles on that. (Mostly shorter pieces that were transcribed directly from Finale). You can have sub-folders/directories to organize your music. Scanned music quality depends entirely on the scan. Scanned music also take up considerably more space than files created directly from Finale. The company has several finale templates available on their web site to help you get started. All their templates and recommendations call for the music to be at 100% scaling (not the typical 80% or less I'd use for the same music if I were printing it to paper). Since there are no margins on the unit there is no need for white space, and the bigger the notes, the easier to read on the screen. To create from Finale all one needs to do is use the graphics tool export feature to created TIFF files. MusicPad then imports those in. Your main computer software (which is where the importing happens) interfaces via network (LAN) or USB with the unit for easy transfer of the music to the unit. Although, unplugging the flash memory and plugging it into your regular computer and transferring the files works quite well too. You can add annotations to the music via a whole slew of various tools. There are also page number display options and rehearsal mark options. Playlists can be created of the titles on the memory stick. When you get to the end of one title, press the next page pedal or screen and the next song appears. I've used that feature a number of times to have an entire program ready to go instead of having to load in each new song. Repeats can be programmed in so that when you press the right (as opposed to left) pedal or touch the bottom-right of the screen it will jump to the spot in the music where the repeat goes, not to the next page. You can also put in what they call 'teleport' pads which allow you to press it and jump wherever you've told it to jump. All of that can be done quite easily. For concert situations in which there is minimal lighting, as a piano accompanist I found it to be terrific. No need for a stand light or special lighting as the unit is backlit and the intensity is adjustable. I've never messed with it, but you can also change the background (white space and staff) colors and the foreground (note/text) colors to any combination you want. In addition to normal portrait mode, there is also a landscape mode. That mode will intelligently split a page of music and display it, much larger, in landscape mode. If you have 3 grand staffs on a page, it usually does well to show one staff system per screen or perhaps the title page and first staff on one screen and then the bottom 2 staves. You can also edit how it breaks the system up. I find that at least with my scanner, the original has to be in excellent shape/layout/typeset in order to get a musicpad format file that is easily readable. With regard to the palm-type device mentioned above, there are many fakebooks available in PDF format (see ebay). MusicPad imports PDF files quite nicely and as long as the original is easily readable, you could put the entire fakebook (or two) into the freehand format and still have some space left over. It has a crude, very crude, ability to insert notes and to erase notes (without erasing the staff). I would never try to write out any passages using it - just to correct mistakes. It does NOT do any sort of midi playback, transposition or anything along those lines. The actual unit runs on Linux software, all of which is updatable via downloads from their web site. The original software released to the public had a utility program that allowed one to open up a linux 'ash' shell (I think it was 'ash') and do just about anything one could ordinarily do with a shell (limited to the number of programs available). The companinon software for either PC or Mac (for some reason no Linux desktop version is available) installs on your desktop/laptop and is used for importing the music into the freehand musicpad format. There is also a video output available which I tried last summer hooked up to a projector system and it worked fairly well. The main problem was that the unit's screen went blank so you had to guess where to press to load in a new file or shutdown, etc. Don't know if that's still true with later software or hardware versions. You can attach two pedals to it, one for left page turns, the other for right page turns in addition to touching the screen to turn pages. Sorry for being so long, but in all quite a nice unit and for any performer that relies on music (as opposed to playing by ear for everything), this is so much better than carrying around paper music. It does take some getting use to, visually, especially with scanned music. That's probably enough. Oh, unless you know you'll need the ability to use the unit on battery power, I'd say save your money and buy the cheaper model and buy your own flash memory (those cigar shaped usb devices) to handle however many songs you want available at any given time. James Gilbert http://www.jamesgilbertmusic.com/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
