My 3 Ring Binder is a PITA

[Willow20]

Anyone know of a decent ipad app that will replace this mess ?
Thank in advance.

[Tom Wright]

A general-purpose library app the jazz guys like is iGigBook. I use TuneLbrarian, because it was offered along with the Portland volumes of fiddle tunes and the Barnes volumes of English Country Dance. Those volumes are available as ready digitized files.

You need to scan sheet music. An app for tablet or phone that I find handy and effective is Scanner Pro. Using the internal camera, it squares up the photo, and can give the solid white background and dark notes you want.

[Mark Seale]

We replaced the binders with forScore. It was a game changer. I also use iGigBook for the various Real Books.

[Jonathan K]

I am using the Apple Books iPad app successfully to read and annotate sheet music in PDF format.

I take iPhone photos of paper sheet music, Airdrop to computer, convert into nice book length PDF and airdrop the whole thing to iPad and open in Books. QED!

[Charlie Bernstein]

No.

You're welcome in advance.

[UsuallyPickin]

OnSong...... Scan your sheets, upload them to Dropbox, a freebie, then Onsong will pick them up from Dropbox. Works great. R/

[jpoulette]

I picked up a cheapie Android tablet. Then converted everything to PDF on my desktop and used the LAN to send them over to the tablet.

PDF apps seem to play well with Android. Good luck!

[Kevin Winn]

Another vote for OnSong. If your music in a text file, you can edit, transpose and a few other very nice things. Songlists are easy to construct, as is filing into "books."

It will display PDF's, but the transposing feature won't work with those.

[Willow20]

Thanks men I think onsong is best for what I do

[20MartinA]

I have an old Kindle. I scan all my music to JPEG and transfer it to the Kindle. No additional soft- or hardware required. Works for me.

[TX2AK]

Yep, another OnSonger here. Our band uses it, and it’s great, because any of us can arrange a set list for a given show and beam it to the others.

[haggardphunk]

Does OnSong have a place online where people share their files/songs?

I use iRealPro a lot for practicing and there's a great online forum where you can find and share charts

[Austin Bob]

I play in a choir, and we pull music from 4 different Hymnals. I used to keep a 6" binder, then transfer my music every week. Huge pain in the neck. I bought an iPad and started using ForScore, it works great! The only drawback is that it displays one page at a time, so I also have a Bluetooth page turner. The iPad is a big investment, but I use it for traveling and for watching videos in my workshop, so I get lots of use from it. ForScore is great if you're building setlists every week and have a huge library of music. Lots of pros use it, and there's lots of videos online to help you get started. It is $20 for the basic version, or $10 a year for the premium version.

[CarlM]

I am going to be the devil's advocate here. I strongly believe that if you are going to perform in public you should know your songs and tunes. Reading them off a sheet detracts from the performance. The worst case I encountered was trying desperately to accompany a woman who was reading her lyrics and would add and drop beats randomly as she searched her sheet for words she did not know. It was bad enough that after the performance people asked me "How did YOU hook up with THESE people?" It is not that difficult to learn lyrics and you lose a lot by reading them off a sheet. If you do not know the songs you are not ready to play in public.

[TX2AK]

That’s obviously ideal in a real band setting where you can rehearse and that sort of thing. I play in church every Sunday, and we get the songs we are going to play and sing 1 hour before; run through then once or twice and play. We could meet during the week, but all of us are busy with life, and so we don’t. We’re not perfect, but we are a lot better than nothing. Same thing for a number of charity type shows, barn dances, jamming at a winery or on the street, etc. Sure, a practiced and rehearsed band is always ideal; but that’s not realistic in a lot of situations. And OnSong or something similar are really helpful in those.

[Kevin Winn]

Does OnSong have a place online where people share their files/songs?

I use iRealPro a lot for practicing and there's a great online forum where you can find and share charts

There is a feature with the OnSong premium version that lets you "beam" songs to others who also have the premium version. Otherwise, a shared DropBox folder is the way to share song files.

[TX2AK]

Yeah, sorry, I didn’t see that question. If there’s an online sharing forum for OnSong, I’m not aware of it; but the folks I play with all do the premium, so we can share between us.

[Berto Boy]

I'm in the minority here, but I use Songbook Pro. It was a reasonable price ($7 I think). Most importantly, I'm not paying a $2 or $3 subscription price each month for life. It does require PDFs instead of a proprietary format that other programs won't read, which is fine because I either scan paper, save as PDF from Pages, or ditto for JPEGs.

In proximity of each other, we just airdrop the file. Alternately, you can photograph the music and adjust brightness, contrast, etc in the photos app before importing the picture into SBP. The ipad camera does a great job.

Organization-wise, you can set up folders and setlists. I play in grass, celtic, praise, jazz, and waltzes so have a folder for each. Also a folder for "to work on" and "to share"

The only shortcoming I've noticed is that once imported, you cannot alter the file name of PDFs and setlists are autmatically named by the date.

[TX2AK]

One thing we love about OnSong is that you can change key anytime you want; and you can have the lyrics displayed with common notations of your choosing. Our guitarist, for example, may select key of C capo 2, because in his mind, that’s what he is playing; but on bass, it’s better to have the true key and have the notations in the Nashville Numbers; but for keys, mandolin, etc., we find it most useful to display in the actual key with true chord notations. That’s a great thing, we can all play the same tune we share, but you can set the notation for your preference. If we covered that benefit above, I missed it (sorry for being redundant, if that is the case).