I wanna new toy

Nickie

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I don't even know if this has been invented yet, but does anyone know... what I want is the answer to lugging around songbooks, short of memorizing every song I want to play. What I want is a Kindle or a Nook that has complete songs, rather than books, downloaded on it. Is that possible, or a pipe dream?
 
I personally use a Kindle Fire. I can browse the web pretty efficiently with that. You'll have to do a lot of work to compile it, but you should be able to collect a whole bunch of tabs and put them together in a .pdf document, or use an app called Calibre to put it all into one complete file. I'm actually toying with the idea myself...I want to collect about 150 or so tabs and organize them by artist in these books, and learn how to play them when I'm on trips or bored.

Cutting and pasting is easy enough, then it's just a matter of converting it into a format that your device can read. Should be simple enough, but time consuming.
 
I have a sheet music app on my iPad called forScore and it works awesomely for any type of sheet music. You just save the PDF to it and voila. I bet you can import PDF files of songs to a nook or kindle too.
 
I don't even know if this has been invented yet, but does anyone know... what I want is the answer to lugging around songbooks, short of memorizing every song I want to play. What I want is a Kindle or a Nook that has complete songs, rather than books, downloaded on it. Is that possible, or a pipe dream?
If you have it in PDF format most of the e-readers will display it. I found my nook doesn't do a very good job, some fonts are real big and some are perfect, no adjustment. I have a cheap Coby 8" tablet with android 2.x running Adiko e-reader software that works great. If you have an Apple iPad there is a lot of music tab/notation apps and peripherals available. I hooked two $10 USB pedals to my Coby tablet and made it a "tele-prompter" for the background info/interesting stories about song we play when we do theme shows. I loaded PDF tabs for an Elvis show we did on short notice (not enough time to learn them) What you want is available, just a function of $$$$s vs effort.
 
I use my ipad and pdf files with ibooks. Super simple.
 
Nickie, that is a great idea. I have blackberry playbook tablet that files can be downloaded on. You can get several different brands of small tablets for $200
 
I have a Pandigital Novel Android 7" tablet I got at Big!Lots for under $80 bucks. It allows me to view PDF, Word, Doc and other format songsheets. I put an 8 gigabyte SD card in it and have well over a thousand songsheets loaded into it with plenty of room for more. I read issues of Ukulele Player Magazine http://www.tricornpublications.com/uke_player.htm on mine too. Ric
 
A couple of Members of our Club have bought used
Laptops very cheaply and display their songs on those
as jpg's! Clear resolution, good page size and a good
battery charge lasts at least the length of a session!
 
Last edited:
A couple of Members of our Club have bought used
Laptops very cheaply and display their song son those
as jpg's! Clear resolution, good page size and a good
battery charge lasts at least the length of a session!
I like that idea. The extra screen size would be welcome, because with my failing eyesight, plus the lighting at some locations, it doesn't help with the Apple iPad and other small screen tablets.
 
I'm also concerned about the screen size. For folks with iPad, Kindle Fire, and Kindle, do you think tabs are readable on those tablets?

I was thinking about getting just a Kindle (B&W screen, the Fire) for storing all ukulele chords and tabs. But I haven't pulled the trigger yet due to the screen size.

My eyesight is OK though.
 
I'm also concerned about the screen size. For folks with iPad, Kindle Fire, and Kindle, do you think tabs are readable on those tablets?

I was thinking about getting just a Kindle (B&W screen, the Fire) for storing all ukulele chords and tabs. But I haven't pulled the trigger yet due to the screen size.

My eyesight is OK though.

The iPad has way more screen real estate than any currently available kindle or nook. Also, the e-ink kindles don't handle pdfs well. Before my iPad, I tried the tabs/songsheets on an e-ink kindle, and VERY quickly went back to paper. But with my iPad, I use GoodReader, a pdf/word/txt reader app which allows mark-up, folder organization, etc. I have all of my song sheets and pdfs of tabs, loaded and it's fantastic. It will download and sync with a dropbox folder, too. It can do 2 pages at a time, as well -- though that's in landscape view, so it's smaller, but I find still readable on a music stand.

At my local club, people are always impressed with my setup -- it's much easier than lugging around our whole songbook and adding pages to it, etc. And much more environmentally friendly.
 
My vision is bad enough that I still haven't bought an iPad even though I'm a techno-geek. I rarely use the screen even on a laptop - basically only if I have to take it to a meeting and then I'm squinting and shoving my nose against it. Normally I run the laptop out to a 23" 1080p monitor and use large fonts in editors, IE zoomed to 150%, etc.

I was reading though where they're now prototyping flexible displays that can be rolled or folded. When that comes out so I can tuck a 20" display into a gig bag and unroll or unfold it onto a music stand - I'll be all over it! Until then, it's still the three-ring binder and large rubber bands to keep the pages from turning in the breeze.

John
 
My vision is bad enough that I still haven't bought an iPad even though I'm a techno-geek. I rarely use the screen even on a laptop - basically only if I have to take it to a meeting and then I'm squinting and shoving my nose against it. Normally I run the laptop out to a 23" 1080p monitor and use large fonts in editors, IE zoomed to 150%, etc.

I was reading though where they're now prototyping flexible displays that can be rolled or folded. When that comes out so I can tuck a 20" display into a gig bag and unroll or unfold it onto a music stand - I'll be all over it! Until then, it's still the three-ring binder and large rubber bands to keep the pages from turning in the breeze.

John

I think those foldable displays are a ways off yet. But the retina display iPad is gorgeous for reading. I'm still on the 2nd gen, but I've checked out the new one, and whew! If I didn't want so many ukes, I'd be all over that thing!
 
The retina display on the new iPad really makes a difference. I got one and I use it frequently at home to read tabs off the web and to play from some PDF songbooks I've downloaded. The only sad thing I have to report is the Daily Ukulele. Whoever set it up for Amazon kindle did a terrible job. The scores are images and they break across pages. This means that you have to tap it twice to be big enough to see then you have to tap it again to make it small, then turn the page, then double tap it again to see the rest of the song. Your group will be done with the song by the time you get to the second page. Maybe it turned out better on an actual kindle but I don't know anyone that has it on that device. I hope a better version comes to iBook someday. I would love not to have to lug my heavy Daily Ukulele around anymore.

Nix
 
The iPad has way more screen real estate than any currently available kindle or nook. Also, the e-ink kindles don't handle pdfs well. Before my iPad, I tried the tabs/songsheets on an e-ink kindle, and VERY quickly went back to paper. But with my iPad, I use GoodReader, a pdf/word/txt reader app which allows mark-up, folder organization, etc. I have all of my song sheets and pdfs of tabs, loaded and it's fantastic. It will download and sync with a dropbox folder, too. It can do 2 pages at a time, as well -- though that's in landscape view, so it's smaller, but I find still readable on a music stand.

At my local club, people are always impressed with my setup -- it's much easier than lugging around our whole songbook and adding pages to it, etc. And much more environmentally friendly.

Thank you for the info, mattydee. You make me want an iPad :( If it were around $200, I would have one already. I couldn't justify $500-$600 for ukulele songbook.

Kindle Fire is tempting too. But the screen is probably too small for tabs and notes.
 
The retina display on the new iPad really makes a difference. I got one and I use it frequently at home to read tabs off the web and to play from some PDF songbooks I've downloaded. The only sad thing I have to report is the Daily Ukulele. Whoever set it up for Amazon kindle did a terrible job. The scores are images and they break across pages. This means that you have to tap it twice to be big enough to see then you have to tap it again to make it small, then turn the page, then double tap it again to see the rest of the song. Your group will be done with the song by the time you get to the second page. Maybe it turned out better on an actual kindle but I don't know anyone that has it on that device. I hope a better version comes to iBook someday. I would love not to have to lug my heavy Daily Ukulele around anymore.

Nix

I refuse to buy a second version of something I already bought once, and you are not the first person I've heard disparage the digitization of DU. This makes me almost want to manually scan the thing page by page, but that's quite a few hours I'd rather spend playing.

Ah well.
 
I refuse to buy a second version of something I already bought once, and you are not the first person I've heard disparage the digitization of DU. This makes me almost want to manually scan the thing page by page, but that's quite a few hours I'd rather spend playing.

Ah well.

Check with your local business copy/printer house. Most of them have fast auto-loading scanners that make short work of scanning a book. Of course, if it's glue-bound you have to be willing to cut the pages and basically destroy the book. But, if it's ring/spiral/plastic-spine bound you can take it apart, scan it, and put it back together.

John
 
I've also considered scanning the DU into PDF. Since it is comb bound it would be easy to take apart. I wonder if a printing company would be willing to do it or if they wouldn't because of legal/copyright issues. Definitely worth checking into. Thanks for the idea!

Nix
 
I've also considered scanning the DU into PDF. Since it is comb bound it would be easy to take apart. I wonder if a printing company would be willing to do it or if they wouldn't because of legal/copyright issues. Definitely worth checking into. Thanks for the idea!

Nix

Some outfits let customers use the copiers / scanners themselves (keeps labor costs down and they're pretty foolproof after all). They probably don't much care what you copy since all they're doing is "renting" you some hardware. Full service houses might be more careful about copyright issues.

John
 
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