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For those who scan their sheet music to PDF or download from IMSLP and use a tablet or laptop for reading their music I have a question.

Let's say you have a book, about 50 pages. Do you scan all pages into one PDF or keep them as one pdf per piece? It seems like music reader software slows down a lot when it needs to read a large PDF file and searching for a piece in the app would be easier if it was one piece per scan. I am just interested what others are doing

I do not have much scanned right now but I would prefer to do it right the first time so I am not going back and redoing it later.

Mike

If you keep it on your computer in the books you can have it both ways and it might stay better organized. If piece X is in book Y, you can then cut that part of the pdf out and copy it to your tablet as needed.

Depending on what you have for a computer, it's usually not difficult to set up a "print to pdf" option so you can just print the pages of the document you want and instead of getting paper out of a printer a pdf file will show up on your desktop. Copy that to your tablet and you're all set.

Good point and I do have a print to PDF option, I am using a Surface Pro tablet with mobilesheets for what it is worth.

Mike

I'm also using mobilesheets (on Android however). I usually split larger books into several PDFs, for exactly the reason you mentioned: To keep file size small enough so that mobilesheets doesn't take too long loading a file.

I usually split along "natural" borders. For example the two volumes with the complete Beethoven sonatas: I made one PDF per sonata. The book with other Beethoven pieces: It already had sections like "the Bonn years", "the early Vienna years", "the late Vienna years", etc. so I created one PDF for each such section. Smaller books, I make one PDF per book.

After adding such a scanned PDF to the mobilesheets library, I also add each piece individually, when/if I actually start to work on it. For one-piece-PDFs (like the single Beethoven sonata scans) that is obviously not necessary anymore. But for PDFs with multiple pieces, I do this: When I start to work on a piece in the PDF, I make a copy of the PDF in mobilesheets (this only makes a second entry in the database that points to the same underlying PDF which itself is not copied, so it doesn't need additional storage space). Then I rename the copy from the full book name to the name of the single piece and adjust the page range, so that only the piece I'm interested in is visible.

That way, I have a database entry for every piece I'm actually playing or working on (or have been in the past) while other pieces may still reside in their multi-piece PDFs. That allows me to easily search for all pieces I've played. Of course not so easily for the other pieces. But then again, I could do this copy-and-pick-a-piece routine for every single piece in a multi-piece PDF beforehand... only I'm too lazy for that...

What device do you folks use to view your digital sheet music? I've looked at a few tablets and they either cost as much as my piano did, or they are just too small. Anything that can't show me a full-size 8.5x11 sheet is too small for me to read, sadly; I bought a refurbished android tablet a while back to try this idea out and while the idea appeals to me, I quickly discovered that the screen is just too small to be useful.

Is there a device that can show a full-sized 8.5x11 sheet and doesn't cost the earth? I've looked at online reviews of the 18" Samsung Galaxy View but it seems like it's a low-resolution thing that's intended for video and moving pictures and not for viewing static image.

I don't think so. Luckily my eyesight is still good enough (with contact lenses) that I have no problem using my 10" Amazon Fire tablet.

My device has a 12.5 inch display and it is still a little small. I think a 13 inch display might be just about there. I am fine with the size and suppose if it bothered me I can go into landscape use split screen. The trade off for bluetooth pedals, the convenience of carry your entire library in a 3lb tablet, and cloud backups are well worth it to me.

I am curious: do people scan a lot of sheet music into PDFs - especially Beethoven etc. that is in public domain already? Judging from the responses in this thread, it seems that people certainly do. I would like to understand why this is done when the sheet music in public domain might already be available online at various sites?

Osho

I depends on what is actually available on the public domain and what is the score being used for. Some would consider invaluable having access to a two century old handwritten facsimile of a piece. But others would find the original version to be of no value at all as they prefer a clean and easy to read version...

Several Beethoven pieces on IMSLP are available not only as high quality scans but also as transcriptions made with modern notation software. But such ideal situation definitely does not apply to all public domain sheet music. It is common to find low quality scans and scans from questionable versions with editorial changes to the original score. Good quality Urtext editions are also not easy to find. As such, it still makes sense to buy a quality paper-based version of a piece on the public domain and then scan it for personal use in digital format. Note that many reputable publishers did not have digital versions of their engravings until quite recently. Henle, for example, is now in the process of converting their entire print catalogue to digital format. And there are excellent initiatives such as OpenScore (https://openscore.cc/) that have the goal of transcribing public domain scores with notation software. So, I believe it is just a matter of time until we start having quality versions of public domain scores in digital format.

I am using forScore with an iPad Pro. In this app, and in other similar score reading apps, you can index a whole book. This means you can select a range of pages from the book and use that range as an individual score. So, you can actually "hide" the books/collections from the library and just have the individual scores there.

The performance of the app will mainly depend on the type of PDF you are using and not on its size or number of pages. If the PDF was produced by notation software you will be using a highly efficient vector-based version of the score, just like a normal PDF with text and some figures. But if the PDF is a set of scanned images then it will be in raster format and the performance will be lower. Many scanned scores available on IMSLP are optimized and should pose no major performance issues. But other versions are not optimized at all and they not only require longer time to load but also a much longer time to render each page. You can try to optimize these files if you have PDF editing software, but the results are not always good. Note that if the PDF is not optimized the major issue is not the initial load time but the time it takes to render each page, especially after a page turn. The render time should not be affected by the overall size of the file but by the "size" of each page. You should actually try different apps and see how they behave as the render performance of PDF readers is quite variable. Nevertheless, I have never found the need to separate these books/collections into individual pieces. But I found the need to optimize the PDFs to reduce the page render time .Note that render time is now a minor issue with the iPad Pro, but I used forScore quite a while with an old iPad...

Cool, thanks for the information!

Osho

With 2nd generation iPad Pros now on the market, there could be some refurbished 1st generation models around at a reasonable price. ForScore (for iPad) is the way to go!

I use a 15.6" USB monitor. I put it in portrait position on my music stand. You can use it is you have your computer nearby or have a laptop. It's USB for both power and video. The one I have is https://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod...XAE3EAQYASABEgJTbfD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds

Goes for $99.

They also have 17" models. AOS and Asus make them--generally $100-150.

--Philistine

Arc_Turous,

That’s great info about the efficiency of the PDFs. I’ve experienced this sort of thing but never understood the cause. I thought a PDF was a PDF. Guess not.

Is there any way to tell what sort of pdf you’re dealing with? I was planning to pay to have a big chunk of stuff scanned, but in the user comments on the vendor web site someone was commenting that the files were larger than expected.

Some pdf reading software allows you to simply click-and-drag graphics off of the sheet and onto your computer desktop.

For a more automated or wholesale solution you can use a program like pdfimages to extract all of the graphics in a pdf at once. You can then do things like decrease the resolution of the image or convert it to grayscale and then re-create the pdf as a much smaller and more efficient file. Many things that are grayscale in real life (like a printed music sheet) get scanned as colour images. This leads to both a larger file size and also can create unwanted artifacts in the image. You can address both of those issues and also re-create a pdf from the extracted graphics using the convert and mogrify programs that form a part of imagemagick.

Both pdfimages and imagemagick are free software; you don't have to pay a cent for them.

Many pdf files can also be compressed and made a great deal more efficient by using ghostscript. Here is a script that I use for that purpose. I've seen many instances where a 4mb pdf turns into a 2mb pdf after running it through this script, and it looks exactly the same afterward.

Scan-score is meant to read scanned score and display it for edit / whatever.

I know a few people who swear by it.

I have PDF of individual pieces. Like to organise a repertoire book by saving composers & genres like Jazz & Pop into different folders.

A tablet is too small for reading except beginner pieces. A computer with a 14" screen is still small but tolerable. I have a portable DP and usually put a computer on the table in front. Shorter pieces I can zoom in without page turn. I also have the option of putting the flat screen TV on the table and connect to the computer by HDMI cable so I can display 2 pages across at a time. The display size is reasonable.

I have a 22inch monitor "kind of" built into my music stand (the music stand is cut away around it). I use Mobilesheets on an ultra compact desktop which is about as big as a Jack Reacher paperback, for comparison. This sits behind the monitor.

Works well for me. It isn't very pretty but that doesn't really bother me as it's in a dedicated room and the convenience and usability far outweigh that in my (engineers) mind.

I meant to add that I'd recommend scanning songs individually where practical as I play from multiple fake, real and song books and trying to find anything is a bit of a pain.

Certainly scan anything you expect to play frequently individually.