12-07-2013, 11:31 PM
I thought about buying a tablet for playing music. For evaluation I have chosen a Samsung Galaxy 10.1 2014 with MobileSheets 4.1.6 via Google Play.
Final result:
* The display is too small for me. One reason is that I am myopic. Announcements let me wait for Samsungs 13.3" tablet.
* I am missing one feature in MobileSheet which is important for: half page turning. This is announced for one of the next versions.
So I am waiting until next year and retry.
While evaluating I faced some facts and feature requests to MS I want to note:
1. MobileSheets "About" dialog gives version 4.1.6, the last announcement in this forum is 4.1.5. Maybe a typo in the software or a forgotten announcment ...
2. MS supports image rotation. This is done via double-tipping. Maybe an alternative would be more intuitive: place two fingers on the tablet a let them rotate.
3. You could configure how to activate the overlap. Default is a single tap. Because chances increase that a simple "next page" results in activating the overlap, I suggest having a "double-tap" or "long-tap" as default. (There was a forum entry here which shows how to configure that behaviour.)
4. Just in idea: improve the AutoScroll and the Metronome by supplying more information. The user could mark the area which build a "line" in the music and save how many measures this line would include. Additional information is the tempo (which defaults to the tempo of the previous line and finally in the tempo of the song).
A Metronome could change its tempo while playing according to the music.
AutoScroll could use this information for calculating the time which is needed for playing one line.
Also AutoScroll could ignore not marked lines (because they dont contain music).
5. Preload of the Setlist. Having all songs loaded into memory would speed up page-turning. If it is not possible to load the entire setlist (maybe to less memory) preloading the next page and holding the last page would also tune the speed.
6. Multi display support. As the price for tablets decrease you could choose the trend using more "commodity hardware" instead of "high end hardware". You could combine multible tablets for building one "big" display.
You have to store where each of the tablets is (like dual monitor support in desktop operating systems). Then input and output could be done via all displays. One of the tablets will be the "master" which holds the configuration and the songs. The "slaves" only require a thin layer for transport the input and output data. Communication could be done via bluetooth or wifi.
This feauture could be interesting for conductors who have to see much more music at once.
Instead of a master-slave architecture a point-to-point could be possible.
Related to this there is a feature request for displaying multiple pages at one screen.
7. Support for "native keyboards". When entering text you only have the virtual keyboard. Supplying other input formats would be nice:
- speech input
- pen writing
8. Export the metadata (title, artist, notes, ...) as plain text (CSV, XML) for further processing. I think there was such a feature request already ...
9. Table overview of all notes. So you could create a "todo list" from all saved notes.
10. Custom stamps. E.g. a danger sign, glasses - so the musician knows to have a deeper look.
11. Translation error. English "Note" could be German "Note" (music) or "Notiz" (text information). The menu is wrong translated:
wrong: Noten | Anmerkungen | Schärfen Bild | Ausrichtung | Metronom | Seiten scrollen | Scroll-Einstellungen
right: Notizen | Anmerkungen | Bild schärfen | Ausrichtung | Metronom | Seiten scrollen | Scroll-Einstellungen
12. Translation error. When editing the notes of a song you have a title "Bearbeiten von Notizen für <Title>" and the input field is labeled as "Noten:". Title is fine, the label should be "Notizen:"
13. Translation error. "Optionen | Fortgeschritten | Bildschirm nicht ausschalten":
wrong: Verhindert das ausschalten ... bitte die Option Immer wählen.
right: Verhindert das Ausschalten ... bitte die Option immer wählen.
14. Missing translation. "Optionen | Anzeige-Einstellungen | Song Anzeige Einstellungen". 4th entry is not translated: "Display Halvdelen side i Landskab".
cheers
Jan
Final result:
* The display is too small for me. One reason is that I am myopic. Announcements let me wait for Samsungs 13.3" tablet.
* I am missing one feature in MobileSheet which is important for: half page turning. This is announced for one of the next versions.
So I am waiting until next year and retry.
While evaluating I faced some facts and feature requests to MS I want to note:
1. MobileSheets "About" dialog gives version 4.1.6, the last announcement in this forum is 4.1.5. Maybe a typo in the software or a forgotten announcment ...
2. MS supports image rotation. This is done via double-tipping. Maybe an alternative would be more intuitive: place two fingers on the tablet a let them rotate.
3. You could configure how to activate the overlap. Default is a single tap. Because chances increase that a simple "next page" results in activating the overlap, I suggest having a "double-tap" or "long-tap" as default. (There was a forum entry here which shows how to configure that behaviour.)
4. Just in idea: improve the AutoScroll and the Metronome by supplying more information. The user could mark the area which build a "line" in the music and save how many measures this line would include. Additional information is the tempo (which defaults to the tempo of the previous line and finally in the tempo of the song).
A Metronome could change its tempo while playing according to the music.
AutoScroll could use this information for calculating the time which is needed for playing one line.
Also AutoScroll could ignore not marked lines (because they dont contain music).
5. Preload of the Setlist. Having all songs loaded into memory would speed up page-turning. If it is not possible to load the entire setlist (maybe to less memory) preloading the next page and holding the last page would also tune the speed.
6. Multi display support. As the price for tablets decrease you could choose the trend using more "commodity hardware" instead of "high end hardware". You could combine multible tablets for building one "big" display.
You have to store where each of the tablets is (like dual monitor support in desktop operating systems). Then input and output could be done via all displays. One of the tablets will be the "master" which holds the configuration and the songs. The "slaves" only require a thin layer for transport the input and output data. Communication could be done via bluetooth or wifi.
This feauture could be interesting for conductors who have to see much more music at once.
Instead of a master-slave architecture a point-to-point could be possible.
Related to this there is a feature request for displaying multiple pages at one screen.
7. Support for "native keyboards". When entering text you only have the virtual keyboard. Supplying other input formats would be nice:
- speech input
- pen writing
8. Export the metadata (title, artist, notes, ...) as plain text (CSV, XML) for further processing. I think there was such a feature request already ...
9. Table overview of all notes. So you could create a "todo list" from all saved notes.
10. Custom stamps. E.g. a danger sign, glasses - so the musician knows to have a deeper look.
11. Translation error. English "Note" could be German "Note" (music) or "Notiz" (text information). The menu is wrong translated:
wrong: Noten | Anmerkungen | Schärfen Bild | Ausrichtung | Metronom | Seiten scrollen | Scroll-Einstellungen
right: Notizen | Anmerkungen | Bild schärfen | Ausrichtung | Metronom | Seiten scrollen | Scroll-Einstellungen
12. Translation error. When editing the notes of a song you have a title "Bearbeiten von Notizen für <Title>" and the input field is labeled as "Noten:". Title is fine, the label should be "Notizen:"
13. Translation error. "Optionen | Fortgeschritten | Bildschirm nicht ausschalten":
wrong: Verhindert das ausschalten ... bitte die Option Immer wählen.
right: Verhindert das Ausschalten ... bitte die Option immer wählen.
14. Missing translation. "Optionen | Anzeige-Einstellungen | Song Anzeige Einstellungen". 4th entry is not translated: "Display Halvdelen side i Landskab".
cheers
Jan