Saturday 18 June 2011

A4 size tablet/iPad

Does anyone out there have a big folder full of lyrics / chord sheets / guitar tabs / Music notation etc? If the answer is yes, have you ever wondered why there is very little available that will enable us to do this digitally at a reasonable price?

There are lots of tablets, iPads, ePads, aPads, eReaders on the market, but they are all too small for this purpose.

What I am looking for is a tablet that will show an A4 sheet close to full size (so maybe around 14"-15"), with touch screen, a lightweight open source operating system, a non-reflective screen with backlight, a 4-5 hour battery life and the ability to display various document formats or at least pdf's, and of course have a sensible price tag.

The Music Pad Pro comes close, so I am going to do a bit of research on it. In the meantime I may look at some cheap 10.2" tablets to see if they will do the job.

I have since found out that the Music Pad Pro has been discontinued in the UK, so I am currently using an Apple iPad 2 with the OnSong app. It takes a bit of editing to get your chord sheets in the correct format, but is well worth the effort, especially if you need to try the song in different keys. You can also set it up to scroll up as the song progresses so it can cope with those long complex songs too. The iPad has lots of music related Apps, that was the reason for choosing it over an Android based tablet.

1 comment:

  1. Hello Alan,
    We noticed your comment about the MusicPad.
    We are SightRead who originally imported the MusicPad into the UK and yes you're right, unfortunately they don't make them any more.
    But the good news is we now have a range of different size screen options and even better software. Take a look at:
    www.sightread.co.uk/sightpadindex.html
    All the best
    David

    ReplyDelete