I'm possibly considering purchasing the "Music Pad Pro" from Freehand Systems, based in Los Altos, California.
http://www.freehandsystems.com/musicpad_pro.html
http://www.freehandsystems.com/faq.html

It's an electronic sheet music reader (outside dimensions: 10” x 13.5”. 12.1” diagonal color LCD touch screen, weight 4.5 lbs) which will store & allow you to view up to 10,000 pages of music electronically. This sounds like an exciting concept to go completely paperless and have all music lead sheets & charts stored in ONE place. The unit also supports handwritten (colored) notations & marking (overlays) over the music: scanned sheet music or downloaded from music software via USB. There is even a feature which allows you to pre-program the music to come up in a pre-determined order for set lists, etc. This can be accomplished either from the built in 'touch screen' or an external foot controler.

I have a vast collection of music fakebooks and sheet music and have always dreamed of being able to integrate my huge collection of leadsheets (including customized chord substitions, notation markings, etc) into one place for instant retrieval and playing on the fly. As much as I wish I had the ability to keep everything memorized in my head, the ability to access my entire song repetoire (1000's of songs) in one place as well as easily take it along to gigs, seems like a dream come true. My only reservation is the price: $1,200 US dollars , and the risk, because this product is so new (release date still not till: June 2002) that there might be bugs in the initial OS release. Do you guys think the Music Pad Pro is worth the investment? Ok gang, I'm really interested in getting your feedback & opinions. Thanks, - Scott

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http://scottyee.com

[This message has been edited by Scottyee (edited 05-04-2002).]

Hi Scott,
For someone like you who makes there living (and have fun ) I would say that it would be an excelent tool to have and.....


Q) What happens if I am not completely satisfied with the Music Pad Pro once I receive it?
A) If you are not completely satisfied with your new MusicPad Pro, simply return it to us within 30 days of shipping and we will refund your purchase price to your credit card. You will need to call 1-800-295-7725 for a Return Authorization Number before you ship it back to FreeHand.

So you can try-it for a month and see how it "works-out" !! My advise: Give it a try
jedi

I remember posting that link almost a year ago - so you're gonna take out another mortgage and buy one huh? It seems like a pretty extravagant tool, but I guess, if you read a lot .... it could come in handy. I wonder how long it will take to load it with all your printed hard copy ? That will certainly factor into the final price. Time is money too !

I'm not gonna need to mortgage the house for this , but I definitely need to figure out, as Uncle Dave said , if it's gonna be worth the time and effort required to get everything scanned & input into the unit. When performing, I never actually read from music, but I sometimes like to have a 'chord' chart/ or lyrics handy to act as a road map, especially for requested tunes not in my core 'A' list repetoire. I'm a decent improviser, but when I'm not confident of the changes, having a chart on hand helps maintain my sanity. At home in the studio, when I'm learning & arranging a tune, I often like to re-harmonize & make penciled in notations (where to trigger arranger variation changes, alternate chord changes, etc etc), so being able to do this directly on the Music Pad Pro would make the process easier & more streamlined, as everything would be stored in ONE place. Your pencil notations (up to 4 different colors) are stored on a separate layer so can be easily edited or deleted without affecting the original scanned music. I only hope the MusicPad Pro includes some kind of software backup utility to back everything up to your computer's hard drive or CD. What a nightmare it would become to lose it all. Anyway. I'll let you all know what I finally decide. The 30 day risk free trial thing sounds pretty appealing though . . . Jedi, thanks for pointing that out. Anyone else here considering getting this unit? Would like to hear more thoughts & opinions from others, cuz getting this will definitely be a revolutionary move (for me). I'm sure that this is the wave of the future, but is this the right time? - Scott

I was just thinking . . . I didn't see anything mentioned on the Freehand Systems website that says anything about the MusicPad Pro including any kind of indexing system which would allow you to quickly search, locate & pull up a specific song (ei: by song type, composer, or alphabetically). Without this feature, I would forget considering the Music Pad Pro altogether. - Scott