I am an amateur guitar player and generally I find that the more convenient it is to play guitar, the more I will play. Towards this end I have a dedicated space where I have my guitar on a stand, a comfortable chair, and a music stand. This basically works well. Over the years, however, I have amassed a fairly large collection of educational materials for the guitar. These range from individual sheets from instructors to books, lps, tapes, video tapes, and dvds. Needless to say, this puts a crimp in my philosophy of convenience. Learning a new piece (or relearning an old one) involves finding the book, setting the guitar up in front of the tv/computer, playing the cd/lp/tape & finding the right remote control.
It has occurred to me that having a tablet pc on my music stand would be a convenient solution. It could house all my music/tablature, play music, show videos and access educational material on the web.
Tablet PCs are being used for this purpose, although some of them are purpose built (see this link ). Does anybody have any experience with using a tablet pc in this manner?
How are you going to digitize all the materials you currently have? Are you going to scan all the sheet music and books? Play back and record all the tapes and LPs? Get a TV tuner and record all the videotapes and then convert them to a format that’ll fit on the tablet? Most of that has to be done manually and at 1x speed or less (i.e. if a videotape is an hour long, you’ll have to spend at least an hour recording it).
Doing all that sounds like a pretty daunting task already.
Then you’ll have to find a way to set everything up. Are you sure the tablet will fit on the music stand without potentially falling off? If you want to view stuff on the web, where will you put the keyboard (unless you want to write out the URLs with a stylus)? Will the screen be big enough for you to actually read the sheet music comfortably (tablets usually have smaller, lower-res screens)?
Just seems like it’d take a bit of effort to get everything up and running. Maybe afterwards it’ll be better, though. Also, Bluetooth support on the tablet would probably be beneficial – you could use a wireless keyboard and place it wherever you want and you could use a wireless mouse (or a wireless trackball presenter) as a sort of remote control to flip pages and whatnot.
The purpose built tablets use a foot switch to change pages (see the link in the OP).
I agree that changing all my current material to something that would be usable on the tablet would be a huge task. I would probably only do that very selectively. My hope would be that more material would be introduced in formats that I could use. Some is already out there (for free) on the web. The challenge would be to get higher quality material (for which the author would expect to be paid). People are understandably reluctant to release material in this fashion as is too easily copied.
Oops, I forgot to mention why I suggested the wireless mouse in the first place. The footswitch is a great idea, but is price an issue for you at all? I’m asking because $1200 is rather expensive for a tablet that can’t (as far as I can tell) function as a regular PC. A wireless mouse could theoretically be programmed to change pages, and if you tape it to the back of your guitar or something, it might work.
Basically, the MusicPad seems like a nice, integrated solution that’ll probably give you sheet music viewing capability with the least hassle. But can it play videos or DVDs? It doesn’t appear to have a disc drive of any sort and it only comes with 96 megabytes of space.
Another possibility you might want to consider is a regular desktop PC coupled with a LCD screen. If you can find a stand for it, the standalone screen will be bigger than a tablet’s screen. Some of them even have built-in TV tuners, allowing you to connect your VCR/LP/tape decks directly and not have to use a separate TV.