For my recent gigs with CSWO, I’ve been using the forScore app on my iPad. It is essentially a PDF viewer but with lots of tweaks that make it work particularly well for music. For example, you can book mark a section in a larger document (say a collection of music) and then add that individual song to a play list. Annotations can be written in a variety of colours and styles and there’s even (I discovered today) a way to preview the top of the next page once you’ve got halfway down the present page and reached a convenient break.

Another feature is adding new scores by scanning them in. I’ve been doing this for ones I haven’t felt the need or had the time to create my own PDF versions of using Lilypond. Up until today, I had been using the ‘photo’ option but I decided to see what would happened if I clicked the ‘scanner’ option instead. I expected it to tell me I didn’t have the right peripheral attached but it turns out it just uses the camera but adds a bunch of useful software tools. For example, it detects the outline of the page, takes the photo, adjusts the perspective to cope with distortions from not holding the iPad exactly straight and even corrects colour and contrast.

As a consequence, I’ve been able to get most of the band pad onto forScore and tomorrow I will finish off the last 30 or so (out of approaching 200). That’s going to be a lot lighter to cart around than the bulging box file and just in time for the summer break! Ah well, it will save the load next term.