By Andrew Liszewski
Last week I wrote about the E-Paper Music Score concept that basically replaced a traditional book of sheet music with a flexible e-paper display. Well given it was just a concept you won’t be able to buy one anytime soon, but it looks like there’s a similar solution already on the market. Instead of e-paper the MusicPad Pro uses a readily available 12.1 inch TFT color display. While the 1024 x 768 resolution is probably more than adequate, it’s also a touch screen allowing musicians to annotate the music or jot notes in multiple colors.
As Apple has shown with iTunes, available content is just as important as the technology, so FreeHand also has an online store with over 98,000 titles of downloadable sheet music already available. The average price seems to be about $3.95, though some titles are slightly cheaper ($1.95) and some are considerably more expensive. ($59.95)
Though with a price tag of $899 on the FreeHand website, I think the MusicPad Pro should include more than just 64MB of memory, particularly since I don’t see any mention of being able to expand that limited amount with flash memory cards.
[ MusicPad Pro ]
There is an alternative called MusicReader. This Electronic Music Stand Software runs on Tablet PC.
You can put an effectively unlimited amount of external memory on the MusicPad with standard USB memory sticks or even USB attached disk drives.
You can put an effectively unlimited amount of external memory on the MusicPad with standard USB memory sticks or even USB attached disk drives.