I have a PDF file that I built from four different PDF Real Books (1, 2, 3, plus Jazz Ltd.). I added bookmarks by hand to index for the most-often played tunes. But it’s a little unwieldy.
I have heard of iGigBook but I don’t understand how it works. It just does indexing; it does not include any charts. How do you map its indexing to a PDF file?
I also have iRealPro but it is just chord charts to avoid copyright issues. Useful as far as it goes but you can’t use it to play (or even read along with) the head.
You can get the Real Books on Kindle and it looks like it’s indexed but there it’s still three separate books, so if you don’t know in advance which book a tune is in, it takes too long to look it up in all of them.
What is the most usable method to get indexed Real Books all with a single compiled index? Think of being at a jam session or gig, someone calls a tune and you have to find it in under 5 seconds.
It looks like iGigBook does what you want. It already knows that, e.g., “Ain’t It The Truth” is on page 4 of the Jazz Ltd. book. (Here is a list of all the books they have – it looks like it has all of yours.) It also lets you download a PDF of that book to your iPad from the Internet, Google Drive, Dropbox, your computer via iTunes, etc. Then, when you look up that song, it’ll pull up page 4+x of that PDF, where “x” is a number you can specify that depends on whether your copy of the PDF has a cover page, index in the front, etc. (x = 7 for the PDF of Jazz Ltd. I found.)
Disclaimer: I’ve never actually used the software. I have no experience with fake/real books in general. I don’t know if there are free apps that would do the same thing.
iGigBook will do what you’re looking for. It doesn’t include PDF files, you have to provide those yourself, but it does provide indexes for a bunch of real books and fake books. I know musicians that used to take suitcases full of books with them to gigs that now just use an iPad and iGigBook.