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05-28-2018, 03:56 PM
Some of my musician colleagues now use MobileSheets on tiny one-page display devices and they have to contend with not being able to look ahead on page turnovers, Dal segno, Dal capo, To coda and sometimes with repeated sections that straddle two pages. I am greatly impressed by the capabilities of MobileSheets but I will not go paperless until I can see two pages of sheet music at near life-size. Gvido and PadMu offer life-size displays on dual screens that hinge together like opening and closing a book. The PadMu is an unknown. They are both very very expensive. The Gvido has no backlighting and can only be operated by a special pen (finger won't do it) so that does not suit me. A similar dual-screen device named NoteNotes is due to come on the market this year.
I like the Samsung Galaxy View 18.4 inch tablet which can run MobileSheets and which can display two almost-life-size pages. It sits safely on a sturdy music stand and it is affordable. I want to buy one but they are not available here in Australia. I tried buying a second-hand one from the states but its battery appeared to be dead so I had to return it. Hopefully I will be able to buy a working Samsung 18.4 inch tablet this year and become a serious MobileSheets user.
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(05-28-2018, 03:56 PM)BrizzoRay Wrote: Some of my musician colleagues now use MobileSheets on tiny one-page display devices and they have to contend with not being able to look ahead on page turnovers, Dal segno, Dal capo, To coda and sometimes with repeated sections that straddle two pages. I am greatly impressed by the capabilities of MobileSheets but I will not go paperless until I can see two pages of sheet music at near life-size. Gvido and PadMu offer life-size displays on dual screens that hinge together like opening and closing a book. The PadMu is an unknown. They are both very very expensive. The Gvido has no backlighting and can only be operated by a special pen (finger won't do it) so that does not suit me. A similar dual-screen device named NoteNotes is due to come on the market this year.
I like the Samsung Galaxy View 18.4 inch tablet which can run MobileSheets and which can display two almost-life-size pages. It sits safely on a sturdy music stand and it is affordable. I want to buy one but they are not available here in Australia. I tried buying a second-hand one from the states but its battery appeared to be dead so I had to return it. Hopefully I will be able to buy a working Samsung 18.4 inch tablet this year and become a serious MobileSheets user. Is there no way to slave 2 tablets together, making the second tablet on your music stand always 1 page ahead? This would mean that you would see over the page 100% of the time, not just 50% as you do with paper.
I haven't got 2 tablets to try it but someone might have.
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05-29-2018, 04:06 AM
(This post was last modified: 05-29-2018, 06:00 AM by chrisss.)
I don't have anything to offer on linking 2 tablets, or on a big 2-pager tablet. But I thought I'd share some of my own steps to address similar concerns, for what it might be worth.
For me a simple linear approach works out really well - make one long score like a player piano roll or a MIDI file, and autoscroll it. For my stuff MSP works a lot better scrolling sequentially+continuously, start-to-finish, straight thru any number of pages, than it did when I tried to make it jump back to a previous point, which often happens in paper scores. It can be a lot more pages than you'd want if it was paper- there's no cost to that. I've decided that scrolling screen works fundamentally very differently than paper, and it works so much better when I de-couple my approach from a "paper origin" approach.
Obviously a lot of PDFs/scores you want on the tablet are carried forward from paper, where repeats, DC/DS al Coda, etc etc saved engraving time and saved printing + paper. So with a pre-existing score, I'll use page selection and annotations (arrows, lines, colors, etc etc) to make it linear. For example, if a multipage, multipart song repeats to page 1, I set up the page order (in Song>Edit>Files) to be pages 1-3,1-3. Or if it repeats back to 1/2-way down page 2, then set up pages 1-3,2-3, and crop the "second page 2" (if you get what I mean) so that page displays where the repeat goes back to at the top of it. Also / or annotate the pages, to help me find my place where the repeat or DS starts from. If there's a Coda on the bottom of page 3, you can set that up as 1-3,2,3 and crop the 2nd page 3 to show just the Coda. Then I'll set up an autoscroll at a speed that keeps me reading more-or-less in the middle of the rolling pages.
You can also do "link points" and activate those with a pedal, and I did a couple songs that way.
It's better still when I have the song in MuseScore (Finale, Sibelius - any scorewriter) cuz with a quick copy+paste I just eliminate repeats, endings, DS al Coda's, etc - just make the whole score linear. I also put the start of each section (or repeat) at the beginning of a new system, and open up space or put in a colored line to make that point in the score visually unmistakeable. Those scores work really well in MSP cuz I can tailor the pages + spacing so the autoscroll works well.
There was a point when I was looking for a 2-pager, and I did buy a 13" tablet. But as I've settled into this linear + scrolling approach, I've become really happy indeed with a 10" tablet - I found I really like the small size, light weight, no pedal to work, + easy logistics, including the smaller visual barrier that it creates between performer and audience.
Just passing it along FWIW. I've no idea whether it might help or work for you or for others.
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I play in multiple amateur "big bands" so I deal with several thousand parts for my particular instrument, most of which occupy two pages. I have been preparing for three years for the transition to paperless by scanning or entering problematic instrumental parts into Sibelius then copying and pasting to make them linear, ensuring that no repeat section straddles a page break. I try to put the page break where there are bars of rest but this is not always possible. Some old dance music from the 1940-1960 era is formatted in dual staves to suit large or small bands with or without a vocalist but I have reformatted those into a single staff to avoid the repeat from the end of the top staff back to the beginning of the bottom staff.
Dual folding tablets are becoming available from Gvido, PadMu and NoteNotes but they are extremely expensive and the buyer is locked in to their app whereas with an Andrloid tablet or an IPAD the user is free to choose the app (e.g. Mobile sheets) for Androids.
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I'm still using my Samsung Galaxy View in 2-page mode as a conductor of a wind band. It works fine, I am satisfied. As a stand I use a normal wooden conductors stand in horizontal position. It seems that the Galaxy View is no more obtainable, even at the Samsung website it's not listed.
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No use if you want to run it solely off battery - they quote 30 mins (and quotes are always optimistic).
Possibly ok if one can have use it plugged in (I haven't checked the other specs)
Geoff
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A lot of people have had major problems with the Nabi Big Tab HD 2. I would strongly recommend staying away from that tablet.
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(05-30-2018, 04:33 AM)Zuberman Wrote: A lot of people have had major problems with the Nabi Big Tab HD 2. I would strongly recommend staying away from that tablet.
Ahh, deleted my post to avoid anyone using the link, etc.
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07-11-2018, 05:36 PM
(This post was last modified: 07-11-2018, 05:53 PM by MelBonis.)
I'm interested in the new Gvido.
- two pages would be really good. I have a lot two page pieces, so no turning pages, aaaaaand I play a lot of accompaniments, where I have to turn pages already after some bars always.....
- E-ink is better for outside. Sometimes I have serious problems with the sun.
- I would like to write with a stylo.
- It has both possibilities for turning pedal: bluetooth and USB.
Anyway, I will wait until the prize is going down at least a bit.
My big question: Is mobilesheets compatible already? Or - is there a chance that it will some time?
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No Gvido for me.... I saved a lot of money ;-)
1. I have just found this on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGN_xqFHcfc
2. And also, when I asked Gvido support how all my existing pdfs would go to there, I got an email saying in short:
a pdf should be less than 1 MB, best would be Grey, 200dpi, and really advisably to have small files, because turning pages would slow down and the quality of the files can get worse....
One should always take things veeery serious if already a seller is warning you, haha.
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(07-11-2018, 06:56 PM)MelBonis Wrote: No Gvido for me.... I saved a lot of money ;-)
1. I have just found this on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGN_xqFHcfc
2. And also, when I asked Gvido support how all my existing pdfs would go to there, I got an email saying in short:
a pdf should be less than 1 MB, best would be Grey, 200dpi, and really advisably to have small files, because turning pages would slow down and the quality of the files can get worse....
One should always take things veeery serious if already a seller is warning you, haha.
Mike, something I have thought about before is 2 page display. I know you have a feature where you can link tablets together to play in a group but I've never used it cos I play solo. Would it be possible to link two tablets together and have one displaying the subsequent page displayed? When page turn is selected on the first tablet, both tablets could turn 1 page. This would show the new "next page" on the right hand tablet. Just a thought.
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(05-29-2018, 07:56 AM)BrizzoRay Wrote: I play in multiple amateur "big bands" so I deal with several thousand parts for my particular instrument, most of which occupy two pages. I have been preparing for three years for the transition to paperless by scanning or entering problematic instrumental parts into Sibelius then copying and pasting to make them linear, ensuring that no repeat section straddles a page break. I try to put the page break where there are bars of rest but this is not always possible. Some old dance music from the 1940-1960 era is formatted in dual staves to suit large or small bands with or without a vocalist but I have reformatted those into a single staff to avoid the repeat from the end of the top staff back to the beginning of the bottom staff.
Dual folding tablets are becoming available from Gvido, PadMu and NoteNotes but they are extremely expensive and the buyer is locked in to their app whereas with an Andrloid tablet or an IPAD the user is free to choose the app (e.g. Mobile sheets) for Androids. Another year has passed and I still do not have a two-page lifesize display device. I need a lifesize display because I am old and my eyesight is not as good as it was. People have described how they use two Android tablets and the MobileSheets application for seeing two pages of music at the same time. All I need now is for a 14 or 15 inch Android tablet to become available in an Australia store so that I can buy two of them and get help if there is a problem. I will transport the two tablets in a Deer River sheet music folder but I will have to lift them out of the pockets after I place the folder on a music stand.
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Incidentally I tried the book mode two days ago and after a bit of fiddling to get the right settings it worked better than I expected. I had my Surface Pro as master, my Xperia Z4 as slave and used 1 page browsing (so the next page is moved from the slave to the master).
There is one flaw there yet. When I got to the last two pages (next to last on the master at the left, last one on the slave to the right) I couldn't move the page from the slave to the master and even worse the master left the song altogether, so I lost the sheet during playing.
Expected and correct behaviour would be that the last page gets transferred to the master as well (and either stays on the last on the slave or something else, like showing the next page of a song in the setlist), especially since I have in my settings that the song should not be changed by pedal.
Also I was missing some of the advantages of vertical scrolling which understandably something different from bookmode. But I would really like a book mode where the pages of the book are displayed like a "page" in vertical scrolling so you can have all the cropping and clipping can be shown on one page (know what I mean? With cropping and clipping I often have two or even three pages shown on one page which are displayed separately in book mode).
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I can work on adjusting the behavior to allow the last page to be displayed on the master - that shouldn't be hard to do. Displaying multiple pages per tablet is a different beast though. That would cause significant complexity in each tablet knowing what pages they are responsible for and knowing what page each one should skip to with each page turn. Unlike the vertical scrolling display mode, I'd have to do multiple passes to figure out which pages can be fully displayed and which can't so that I don't display part of a page on one tablet. Perhaps long term I could try to tackle something like this, but in the short term, I can't bite off something this complex off as it's really like an entirely different kind of book mode instead of just a small change to the existing design.
Thanks,
Mike
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BTW, nice that I can connect the tablets with Bluetooth and also can change the master with a Bluetooth pedal at the same time. It's probably due to the Surface being able to connect to more than one BT device at the same time. I guess that's something that not all tablets are able to do.
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