Multitasking using Player

[dflat]

The iTunes iOS app store has a number of PDF viewing apps for musicians. Most are for the iPad only and designed to work specifically for music notation. They are all in their infancy and many (what might be) essential features seem to be lacking. Hopefully by next year, they would all have gained maturity.

Here is a list of some:
forScore (see next post)
unreal book
Deep Dish Gigbook
PDF sheet music reader
Medley: Music score reader
Forzando
Next Page
Scorecerer (a companion Windows and Mac version available)

Some of their features: (not all)
-'hot points' where you tap a specific location and another page location quickly appears (D.C., D.S., or page turns, repeats etc.)
-notes layer (for fingering, bow markings, making notes, highlight markers, 'erasing' parts of the original score, annotations etc.)
-various ways of organizing any combination of the scores (title index, set lists (for a gig list or practice charts,) collections, keywords, difficulty rating, composer etc.)
-automatic sort by composer, genre, keyword, title
-zoom settings to eliminate large margins of white space (often necessary with scanned music)
-coupling a score with an audio file
-metronome
-adding in complete PDF documents
-adding in separate PDF files for each tune

Unlike iBooks (see a previous post) you do not have to composite the PDF pages into a single document (although some allow multi-paged documents, keeping them intact for searching.)

In most of these apps, adding additional tunes is easy, just drag more PDFs to that app in iTunes or email and "Open in…" to import. (No need to merge with the original composite document, create their bookmarks and reorder everything.)

The table of contents (index) is constructed using each PDF filename, so no bookmarking (as in iBooks) is necessary although some apps allow for further bookmarking (used for example in a multipage document with a number of pages and different tunes that need indexing.)

I hope to post a report on one or two of these apps in the future.