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Show HN: Sheet Music Management App

github.com

65 pointsadius30 comments

I understand that this is an ad for airsequel, but as a musician and programmer I have no idea what this is. What kind of sheet music does it accept? Do I need to manually enter in all the fields?

It's supposed to be used to manage your own collection of sheet music, so yes, you have to upload everything yourself. It supports most image formats (JPEG, PNG, …), SVGs, and PDFs. I recommend using SVGs because it has the best quality to file-size ratio and unlike for PDF all pages can be loaded in parallel.

Interesting. But do I get it right: if on band rehersal or public gig, if offline, then no sheet music? Or is there local bufferung / offline mode?

Yeah, no offline mode yet, but we're planing to open source the core SQLite to GraphQL engine underlying Airsequel. Then you could simply have the SQLite database and the GraphQL API server offline and connect the sheet music app to that!

Here is our announcement blog post with some more details and a short roadmap:

https://blog.airsequel.com/announcing-airsequel-sheet-music/

I mean why not just use ForScore on an IPad? It's the best solution available by far. I get this is probably a desktop app, so the comparison is not relevant.

There’s also a Mac ForScore app.

MobileSheets, a cheap foot pedal, and a Fire Tablet work just fine for me. I use genius scan on my Pixel 7 to grab digital images of the music.

Thank you for introducing me to genius scan. I have been getting more and more frustrated with CamScanner as the UI degrades with each version push, even as a paid user. Genius scan is great.

Which foot pedal are you using? I tried a cheap one from AliExpress but it doesn't actually send PageDown keypresses, rather tries to simulate dragging. And it came broken anyway.

Yueyinpu Wireless Foot Pedal. Had it about a year and no issues so far!

I'm always looking out for a lightweight nice touchscreen device with a sufficiently large screen for reading sheet music.

The Gvido sheet music reader is discontinued (and was super expensive). Other eink displays are also super expensive, and non-eink tablets tend to be too small, maxing out at around 10". The Yoga Book 9i with dual 13" oled displays could be tempting but is again overkill to get a $2000 device just to read sheet music...

If it doesn't need to be dual-display, there are some 13" e-ink options. Fujitsu Quaderno A4, Onyx Boox Tab X. No idea what the sheet music reading software ecosystem on these looks like though, you might be confined to PDF.

I got the AOC Q24V4EA QHD Monitor. Really good value for the money. I've tried several display dimensions and I think 2560 x 1440 works really well for sheet music. (Of course 4K would be better, but I don't want to pay that kind of money for a screen that is standing on my piano and gets only used irregularly)

The Surface Pro looks like it is sub-$1000 and comes with a 12.3" screen (I think they still use a non-16:9 aspect ratio which is why it isn't just 13"). I had one a few years ago and it was great for sheet music. Since it is Windows, you can easily manage PDFs. It had a pretty good built in PDF reader as well that also allowed markup so you could easily add in any extra notes. How reasonable it is to use for actual performance probably depends on what type of music you're playing (if it's piano, you really should print it out or get a special pedal for page turns).

I just use a cheap chromebook that can be flipped to be used as a tablet. Works like a charm and is very affordable.

I hear you. My compromise has been to use a cheap ChromeBook with touchscreen that flips around. I use the (somewhat clunky) Android MobileSheets app which supports syncing across various cloud storage so that part works quite nice.

But probably doesn't quite fall into the "lightweight" category...

I don't think a reliable one with low latency exists, which is why almost all professional musicians end up using an iPad Pro. Insane overkill, but unfortunately the best solution.

I legit just want the cheapest iPad internals that could drive the 12.9” screen. If they made that option, it’s what I’d have. Still being able to at least kinda use Pencil a big bonus, but its absence not a deal breaker.

I doubt I’m alone. But I also doubt I’m alone in buying the 12.9” pro just for having the giant screen on an iOS device. So they might be smart not to make that option.

I love my Remarkable 2 for sheet music. Just the right size for me, and easy to use the pen to annotate my scores. The scores all have to be PDF, but that seems to be what everyone uses anyway. Plus I'm a classical musician so lots of my music is on imslp as PDFs anyway...

Do you connect a pedal to the Remarkable?

I tried mine for this use case before but found it a little too hard to read without a bright lamp aimed directly at it from one side. The contrast is just a little lacking.

Boox tab X; it's eink!

Both of my kids are classical music students. With extremely rare exceptions, everybody seems to use an iPad, latest and biggest model, with a page turning pedal. Virtually all classical material has been scanned or digitized. Not so in my world, jazz. My band's charts are still all on paper.

Why the iPad? There may be an aspect of "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." If your iPad fails or runs out of battery (it happens), other people will be sympathetic. If you bring something "weird" and it fails, it will be because you tried to cheap out on something weird, and it's your fault.

You'll get less screen area than you might expect unless the screen has the same aspect ratio as typical 8.5x11. I own a 10" tablet that's sufficient for reading lead sheets (melody plus chord changes) but am seldom motivated to actually use it. I already know most of the standards that are likely to be called on a gig.

My jazz group would just take any paper sheets and either re-transcribe them or take photos/scans, send em to Dropbox, and then read them in forScore. Our whole repertoire was in Dropbox in case we had somebody sit in on a gig who needed to play lead lines or something. With Scribd and digital realbook collections, the amount of music that’s around digitally is mind blowing.

As for why an iPad, I think it’s more that either folks already have iPads, or they get them because “creatives” like using apple products. Same reason musicians will often get a MacBook instead of a dell even if they don’t need it for any particular reason. Both of those reasons would lead to the network effect of folks asking their friends/colleagues what they use, and then buying an iPad because of that.

Big-band music is sadly in much worse shape for digital preservation. Anywhere from 16 to 19 parts per chart, 2 to 5 pages per part. A few band members have been individually digitizing their "book," but there hasn't been a coordinate effort.

My other band, a quartet, is more like what you describe. And anything new is going to be in digital format.

Ah, yeah I can see how big band would be a totally different beast.

Get the big iPad Pro. I got the iPad Air (10.86") for reading sheet music (piano and singing) and I love it, but after using it for a while I wish I had purchased the 12.9" Pro. Some people in my conservatory have it and it works great for them.

I'll probably end up upgrading soon just so reading sheet music is more comfortable. And it is much cheaper than $2000 (It reaches almost $2k with the 1TB + Apple Pencil, but starts at like $1.1k). No dual displays though.

I'm not sure if it qualifies as lightweight, but if you are referring to actual weight, it seems to weigh around half as the Yoga Book 9i and a bit more than double the Gvido sheet music reader...

The Air weighs 1 lb and it feels fine when holding it up during a performance, the 13" Pro weighs 1.5 lb.

I'm a pro musician and play a lot of gigs (and mix a lot of live music) on a 2016 12.9" ipad pro.

I used Forscore and have a bunch of fakebooks and custom charts on it. Even with a regular stylus it's been very useful (though I occasionally wish my 1st gen pencil had not died).

If I had to replace it I don't think I'd bother with a super new one, as this is plenty of horsepower / memory for the things I use it for. So probably way less than $1k, I'd think.

I recently moved from Piascore to ForScore. I still haven't got used to the gestures, annotations, settings and setlists, and I haven't found a way to set the UI to have the note names (Do, Re, Mi...), but otherwise I like it so far.

You are right on the horsepower, might also be worth getting a refurbished one instead. But I've ended up using my iPad for way more than just reading music so I'd get the new one if I was shopping atm.

Ooooh this is very cool. So much amazing AI for music right now like https://crfm.stanford.edu/2023/06/16/anticipatory-music-tran... - I wonder if it could be plugged in.

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