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Anyone using a foot or other switch to turn pages on an iPad? Any recommendations or warnings?

This company is located pretty close to where I live.

https://www.airturn.com/products/catego ... oth+Pedals

I thought the previous line of products were kind of flimsy looking. The recent models look like they're made of metal, but they are also plastic. Still, apart from the plastic box, they seem like a good solution.

Thanks, man. That’s top of my list based on online reviews. Sam Ash doesn’t stick them in store. I’d like to see them before I buy so I guess I’ll have to suffer thru the Git Box Center.

I'll ask my daughter. She's an avid user of these.

At one of her concerts recently, the stage was littered with these as nearly every chorister had one at his/her place.

mikehalloran wrote:I'll ask my daughter. She's an avid user of these.

At one of her concerts recently, the stage was littered with these as nearly every chorister had one at his/her place.

Thanks, Mikey. I went to an event honoring Raymond Scott recently and pretty much all the players were using them. I HATE page tunes. I have pretty dry hands and always manage to turn two or three pages. It's really the worst part of any gig for me, not to mention how much I'll save on printing 9x12 to 9.5x13" scores!

From my daughter, Marjorie. Steven is my son-in-law, the iOS engineer at Apple.

Hi dad! The page turner I have is this one: PageFlip Butterfly Bluetooth Page Turner Pedal https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01LIROF7W/re ... 3Bb9MZYSYY

Cicada Pageflip is the brand I think, there are a few out there. Steven says he’s almost positive he paid way less for mine, I bet you could find a cheaper one out there.

The app I use for music is ForScore (the icon is teal with a black F). It’s awesome, you can annotate things, create shortcuts/bookmarks, make set lists, there’s a keyboard and you can add audio files to the PDFs so you can listen while you look at it. It was about $5-10 and I’ve been using it as long as I’ve had an iPad!

~Margie Halloran

In between Margie and me is her friend and mentor, Alice Parker (Robert Shaw choral series). Ms Parker is in her mid '90s and still working and teaching.

Thanks Mike and daughter! One review I saw said that the Cicada was a bit noisy and made of plastic. I'll let you know what else I find out.

I’ve been using the Airturn in conjunction with ForScore on my iPad for a couple of years. EZ and works great.

Thanks again, guys. I got an Airturn PedPro. I'm kind of disappointed that it doesn't work with Acrobat Reader. I have 2 weeks to figure it out before I can't return it (which I don't want to do). I can buy a reader but it'll cost almost as much as the darn footswitch.

Probably 90% of the scores I'll be doing are original and many are already in PDF format.

From the PR stuff, I got the impression that the pedals could be programmed fairly easily for most app. Not so. I've yet to try keyboard mode, but it would seem to me that I could make it work in Acrobat and Word if I can get it to send the appropriate key combo.

I kind of feel like the old grandpa who can't figure out how to work his cell phone. I can rebuild a piano, orchestrate for 106 musicians, and run a polling place, but I can't figure out how to make a pedal send a simple page turn to an app.

Who do I have to screw to get out of this business?

I'll fu... mess with it tomorrow. Gotta go play a midnight show. I'll keep y'all posted on my progress or lack thereof.

Much thanks, again ladies and gents. Special thanks to Mike. The forScore app works fine with lots Of nice features for $10. Acrobat doesn’t like the PedPro. Much to learn now...

Please keep me posted on your experiences with this , MLC!

Buzzy


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

buzzsmith wrote:Please keep me posted on your experiences with this , MLC!

Buzzy


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Hey Buzzy! I will. So far so good in terms of basic setup. Apparently the issues are with certain apps not responding. Acrobat for one. That kind of sucks. I can get around scores with forScore (which has its own set of limitations and poor GUI, IMO). But when I'm just improvising from a script (text only) for a theater piece, I've yet to get that to work.

The other thing that's a downside is size (story of my life... lol). Even on a 12.9" iPad Pro, the notes are smaller. That's OK if you're already familiar with the piece and the score is more for reference, but it could be a serious issue sight reading at a gig (at least for a pianist and certainly for a conductor).

I haven't actually played thru a score using it yet, only set it up tapping with my fingers (which requires a bit of effort. Foot taps are very reliable as far as I can tell.

MIDI Life Crisis wrote: The other thing that's a downside is size (story of my life... lol). Even on a 12.9" iPad Pro, the notes are smaller. That's OK if you're already familiar with the piece and the score is more for reference, but it could be a serious issue sight reading at a gig (at least for a pianist and certainly for a conductor).

That is one of the things that has put me off of wanting to use a stupid iPad for chart reading. Also, the workflow for jotting in my little notes or symbols is just not acceptable. Paper is way better for that.

Back to pdf files. I use them in the Kindle Reader app on my iPad. Don’t have a foot pedal but I understand they work with it. I tap the edge to turn pages.

Uploading files is easy through email (hold on the attachment and select Kinde) or drag and drop into app on Mac or PC (I forget the name).

Unlike ForScore, you can’t just annotate directly but I did that in Preview or Acrobat Pro for the opera I did a couple of years ago.

I prepared this pdf file of the 1912 Schirmer vocal score for Handel’s Messiah expressly for the iPad. I had to crop, frame and clean up the pages to make it work clearly. Acrobat Pro is faster than Preview.
http://www.pclg.org/hp_wordpress/wp-con ... Tablet.pdf

I find that iBooks is fairly useless.

MIDI Life Crisis wrote: Even on a 12.9" iPad Pro, the notes are smaller. That's OK if you're already familiar with the piece and the score is more for reference, but it could be a serious issue sight reading at a gig (at least for a pianist and certainly for a conductor).

When you edit the score, there is a zoom slider at the bottom of the dialog. I like forScore a lot, one of the main reasons I use an iPad. The most frustrating problem I have with it is the damn screen reflections, which come from lights that are always at the most inconvenient angles.