I already have most of my music in PDF format and had wanted to use my Samsung NC10 to read music from but this had a number of drawbacks, the screen was poor at a distance, hitting the right button to flip pages was tricky and perching in on the piano was a bit of a balacing act as the screen only opened about 100 degrees. So step in the iPad and forScore.
My music stand is about arms length from my head when sat at the piano, a traditional upright will of course be closer as the control screen for the piano is in the way. Even with this extra distance I find it quite readable. With some of the PDFs there is a lot of white space around the edge which makes the job of the screen even harder, but even given this the high density of the iPad screen makes reading the sheet music fairly easy.
Page turns are a tap or swipe away, one little bug in forscore is you can flip back through multiple pages to get to a repeat easily but you can’t do that going forward to get to a coda. I expect this is related to caching so I hope the developers are able to pre-cache the next couple of pages soon too.
Getting the music onto the iPad is easy, with the ipad docked go to the apps tab in iTunes, scroll down and choosing forscore add the PDF files. It does only take PDF files, the developers say this is to try and keep page sizes standard amongst other things. This makes sense and for the mac users anyway it’s easy to convert anything to PDF or combine multiple images into one PDF using the software built into the Mac (a quick google will come up with Automator apps).
There are plenty of PDF readers in the app store, so why pony up a bit of cash (£2.99) for forScore? There are a couple of features that make it specifically suitable for use for sheet music. Firstly there is a metronome built in that is either audible or flashes a thin border around the page, or indeed both. I could see that being useful in performance where you don’t want to give away your sloppy timing ! The next feature is adding notes, tapping and holding greys out the music display and lets you write in a choice of colours onto of the music directly. This is perfect for adding comments and emphasis that you or the conductor want to add.
Overall, as a sheet music reader, provided your eyesight is ok (I wear glasses), then forscore is very good at the job. As an added bonus it comes with a fairly large selection of classical pieces organised by composer so you can install and get started straight away.
This post was written 100% on the iPad. The photos were taken RAW on my Nikon and imported using the SD card reader, then the post written and images attached in WordPress for the iPad.