Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Finally - a tablet that's big enough to be useful

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Posted by Frank Cox (Member # 6258) on 08-30-2018, 07:59 PM:

I bought a Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 with a 9.7" screen a few days ago after trying out my wife's new 8" tablet and saying "hey, this is almost useful!" So I bought the next size up.

It's amazing what a difference that extra 1.5" of diagonal screen size makes. Any other tablet (and my phone) makes me work to read it, but this one is big enough that I can sit back and read it at a normal distance, like a book or a newspaper.

I mostly use it as a remote terminal/command line through the Termux app, but this one is actually big enough that I can read my sheet music off of it when I'm sitting at my piano.

What a concept; no more paper shuffling to find that piece that I know is in the pile here somewhere....

Posted by Justin Hamaker (Member # 2165) on 08-30-2018, 09:07 PM:

I've been using that size Samsung tablet for about 3 years, and I agree about how much more useful it is.

As far as your music goes, I wouldn't be surprised if there is an app which will follow along as you play and automatically progress through the 'book'.

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 08-31-2018, 03:00 PM:

I'm not a big Apple fan, but I did buy an iPad Pro last year. It has a large 12.9" screen. I bought an Apple Pencil ($99) to use with it. The pencil works very well; it's literally what sold me on getting the iPad Pro versus paying more for other screen/stylus setups. A bunch of the graphics applications in the app store are a bargain.

The unit does have its down sides: only one port (a Lightning port) and moving files between the iPad and computer can be a pain sometimes. I'm used to organizing files using a real file management application like Windows File Explorer on a PC or the Finder on a Mac. The iPad Pro has a file manager on it, but it's so stripped down that it's all but pointless to have on the device. So I end up just treating the unit as if it has only 3 folders: one for iCloud, one for Dropbox and one for Adobe Creative Cloud.

I haven't messed with Samsung's Galaxy Tab devices much, but I would expect them to work similar to the Galaxy phones. I can attach my Note 5 to my work PC or notebook and the phone shows up as an external hard disc. Nearly all of the phone's folders are accessible in Windows File Explorer.

Posted by Harold Hallikainen (Member # 5405) on 08-31-2018, 04:27 PM:

I have a Samsung tablet with stylus, but barely use it anymore. For real work, I want a keyboard. I did have a Bluetooth keyboard for use with the Samsung tablet, but I still like my Chromebook a lot better. And I still do a lot of work on a Windows desktop, but all stuff at home is either on the Chromebook or a Linux machine. I've tried using the tablet to ssh into a server. I like the Chromebook more!

Harold
Fuddy duddy

Posted by Frank Angel (Member # 248) on 09-10-2018, 10:10 AM:

quote: Frank Cox
this one is actually big enough that I can read my sheet music off of it when I'm sitting at my piano.

Frank, now what some smart programmer needs to do is to have that tablet's mic listen to what you are playing, sync it to notes on the page of the music on the screen and then TURN THE PAGE when you get to the bottom. Now THAT is something I would actually call useful.

Someone gave me an Amazon tablet as a gift six months ago. Barely use it now, and when I do, it only takes about 15 to 20 mins before I have resist the incredibly compelling temptation to put an ice pick thru it. I want keys that fit my fingers. Hey Harold, mind if I join you in the Fuddy Duddy column?

Posted by Barry Floyd (Member # 385) on 09-10-2018, 10:25 AM:

quote: Harold Hallikainen
I have a Samsung tablet with stylus, but barely use it anymore. For real work, I want a keyboard.

We have a Samsung Galaxy tablet at the drive-in (using the TextNow app) to text our customers who order pizzas when their food is ready. My employees hated the tablet because the numbers on the screen were too cumbersome and small to use (especially my girls with longish finger nails).

I found on Amazon these adapters that you can insert into the end of a regular USB plug and then plug a full-sized device into the base of the tablet.

Amazon Link HERE

I bought the girls a USB numeric keypad to plug into the tablet and it works perfect.

Posted by Frank Cox (Member # 6258) on 09-10-2018, 11:44 AM:

They actually make foot pedals for musicians to turn the pages.

Airturn

I haven't got one yet, though I probably will buy one at some point.

However, I have found the most wonderful app for reading documents on the tablet:

Document Viewer

It's based on the ebookdroid app and has some clever features, including optional automatic margin cropping for pdf's so the text and/or graphics will fill the screen rather than having a bunch of wasted white space surrounding the content that you really want. (The automatic margin cropping isn't perfect; on some documents it cuts off part of the actual content for reasons that I haven't yet discerned. But generally it works quite well.)

And it looks pretty. The recently used document list is a bookcase with the document covers on shelves. The shelves even have cobwebs on them before you fill them up with books. [Smile]

If you have an Android phone or tablet, I highly recommend the Document Viewer app on F-Droid for pdf files and ebooks. (And I trust F-Droid more than I trust Google Play.)

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 09-10-2018, 04:44 PM:

quote: Frank Cox
They actually make foot pedals for musicians to turn the pages.

Nice idea, unless you're an organist and your feet are in use to play the music! In fact, editors of organ scores tend to put the page breaks during pedal heavy and manual light passages, to leave a hand free to turn the page. For example:

Even if my sight reading was good enough to play something like this in real time (which it isn't), I would never try to play it seriously other than from memory. For the learning stage, the cheap inkjet printer really is your friend, because you can annotate and scribble on sections of score (e.g. with fingering and pedaling indications) as much as you like, without defiling your reference copy, and place the loose pages next to each other that have difficult passages that cut across a page break.

Posted by Monte L Fullmer (Member # 2797) on 09-12-2018, 02:20 PM:

Esp with landscape scores: Best to have these score in a ring binder instead of being glued to flip pages easier.

Some, like me, put tabs on the edge of the page so to grab the page easier and make a quicker turn.

If a multipage score, I put the tabs one slightly lower than the previous tab so one doesn't grab the wrong tab..and miss a page.

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 09-12-2018, 06:51 PM:

The layout and editing of a score make a huge difference as to how sight readable it is.

A lot of the stuff on free-scores.com is scans of editions published in the Victorian era and early c20 (obviously, because they're now out of copyright) - portrait format, and the notes are so closely spaced as to make sight reading at the composer's intended tempo very difficult. In those days, the cost of typesetting and printing was so high that an extra page could make the difference between it being viable to publish something and not. The scans of them available for free download all over the net are fine as an aide to memorizing, but I'd never want to try to sight read in real time for them, even if my sight reading was much better than it is. Some of them also have some bizarre fingering indications on them, which seem to assume that you have tiny hands. If you have larger ones, these indications can be a misleading distraction until you learn to ignore them.

There can also be actual content issues, too, especially in the case of pieces where multiple editions have resulted from musicologists differing as to the composer's intentions, autograph scores don't survive, etc. In the case of the version of BWV540 I pasted a bit of above, one of the three minor variations of the central C major section of the toccata is missing.

Many new scores are landscape format, with page breaks edited for playability, and no volume so thick that it won't sit flat on a stand or make the pages difficult to turn (e.g. the Peters Edition J.S. Bach organ works). For a pianist or organist with seriously good sight reading skills, they'd be viable for "live play." I did actually buy the Peters volume containing BWV540 after getting overly frustrated with the freebie online one. Debating whether to learn the fugue (which is totally boring and unremarkable, and which I don't really like), or make BWV542 my next project.