China cheapies - Chuwi Hi12

When first tier manufactures move on to new and better screens, or just pass the exclusive on the screens in the their latest and greatest, second tier Chinese manufacturers get the chance to use them. You can now get a dual-booting, Windows and Android, Intel Atom based tablet behind an iPad retina screen from the likes of Onda, Teclast, Chuwi and others you've probably never heard of, all in the $200-$300 range.

You won't see them at BestBuy and you'll pay a premium if you want to get them from a place like Amazon or eBay. Your best bet, if you're brave enough, is to order direct from China through a place like GeekBuying,  BangGood, or GearBest (see a theme?).

But, it's been a while since I've been willing to tolerate a 9.7" screen for sheet music, so while the idea of Windows/Android on that screen is interesting, it's not particularly useful to me, especially since none of them support pen. However, now that Microsoft has moved to a bigger, higher density screen for the Surface Pro 4, the Surface Pro 3 screen is now available to these Chinese manufacturers.

Chuwi has slapped one of these Surface Pro 3 screens on their Hi12, packed it with an Atom processor, 4GB of RAM, and a 64 GB SSD for a fantastic sub-$300 price. Of course you have to order direct from a Chinese deal site like banggood or gearbest and hope you get a good one, since things like warranty support and quality control will also be second tier. It might be worth it in the case of the Chuwi Hi12 to get a 12", 1440p screen with, get this - an active digitizer!

So of course when one showed up on my local craigslist, how could I not get it? I mean, I totally don't have the patience to wait for shipping from China, but if I can just email some random person and go buy it, that's totally going to happen. The guy suggested a dessert place near his local BART stop, so we loaded up the kids and headed out. The kids loved the restaurant and I'm typing this on my shiny new-to-me Chuwi Hi12.

You'll notice it came with a mouse. If you're reading this, you've probably got another tab open with reviews. (I highly recommend techtablets to learn more about these machines) and everything you'll read about how terrible the trackpad is is true. I actually like the springiness and stiff feedback of the keyboard itself, but the trackpad is really terrible.

If I were buying new, I'd skip the keyboard and grab the HiPen (yes, that's what it's called) instead. Stock comes and goes on those, so to get one in a reasonable amount of time, I went with one listed on Amazon. It's still shipping from China, but it was in stock and ready to go. It'll probably be another week before it shows up, and I'll have a more in depth look at the tablet then.

It's kinda quiet in here

But I've been a bit busy. Because someone thought it might be a good idea to take on a show with a tech week the same week as the last week of school, culminating in a run from the school concert to the opening night of the show. Since traffic is so beyond messed up here in the Bay Area, leaving the city to head south during evening commute was no big deal since everyone is going the other way - from jobs in the valley back to SF. I was just hugely bummed to miss  out on the after-concert chatting time with students and parents.

The other reason I haven't posted much is because I've got a set up that Just Works. I mostly have material for the blog when I'm testing stuff, or interested in the Next Big Thing. For now, my HP Pro Slate 12 is doing all I need it to do.

There are two other standard size iPads in the pit and they're just so tiny looking. Several musicians have expressed interest in my set up, especially because I'm using not-an-ipad. The cellist said he's wanted to find out more about the options, but everyone he's seen is just using an iPad and he doesn't want to go that route (either too little, or too pricey). He's now stalking the one HP PS12 on ebay. It seems I grabbed mine at just the right time, as they haven't come up much recently.

I should also mention that the two iPad players in the pit are also reading inserts off of paper. I scanned my inserts, used Xodo online to merge them into main show book, used thumbnail view in Xodo on the PS12 to move them into the correct place in the score, deleted everything I didn't need, then exported the completed book. I still like to perform out of MobileSheetsPro because of the half page turns, but I could have just as easily kept it in Xodo and performed it from there.

I do have a new tablet kicking around the house right now that I'll write more about soon. It's not quite as big as the PS12, so it's not going to replace my main reader, but it'll be fun to play with and should prove an interesting Surface alternative for those who don't want to be limited to Android.

Also, the latest post over at techinmusiced has me interested in learning more about XML again. I abandoned experiments in scanning years ago, but if it's so easy to convert from PDF to XML now, I need to look into it again. And it looks like there's an app that'll cover both.

Turn page loudly

I guess I'll just have to cough a lot.

13 e-ink reader with Wacom? Maybe...

Once upon a time I had a nook. I loved the e-ink screen. I dreamed of putting music on it. A parent in my studio had the big Kindle and I dreamed of putting music on that, but he lamented how clunky the annotation options were, and that was just text. E-readers have mostly fallen out of favor since light up screened tablets can do everything and books, so unless you read enough for the light up screen to bother you, an e-ink reader is just one more thing to have to carry.

I've still dreamed of a giant e-ink reader, but after the big Kindle died, that was kind of it. Then, years later, Sony did their giant thing. But it's seriously pricey for a single purpose device when you can get an iPad Pro for not much more that does soooooo much more.

Good e-Reader is one of those niche site with a good forum and community that built up during the e-reader boom. I hung out there some when I had a nook to play with, and again when I briefly had an Entourage eDGe. Actually, it was probably the mobileread forums. I forget, sorry.

They're still around and going strong and are actually about to pull off one of those things that internet communities like to talk about. They wanted a device that no one else was making, so they decided to make their own. And they're very nearly full funded on Indiegogo.

They've got a good set up, as it will only take 60 pre-orders to go to manufacturing. The Good e-Reader 13.3 is built off a reference prototype that Netronix was showing off at CES, so the hard work is nearly done. Their work has been more about tweaking the software.

Sadly, that software is stuck at Android 4.0.4. While it has the google play store, and can run apps like Mobilesheetspro, it can't run Microsoft Office apps, which means no OneNote. That's hugely disappointing on a 13.3" e-ink screen with a Wacom digitizer.

Another huge missing piece is Bluetooth. So, even if you put Mobilesheets on it, you'll still have to tap to turn. Admittedly, it's still faster than flipping a paper page, but you have to turn every single one of them, not just every other one.

The real attraction is the 13.3" Mobius e-ink screen. The 1200x1600 resolution is good, but not great in this post-retina-display era. Also, the 4GB of storage and 512MB (yup, not even a gig) of RAM and quite outdated at this point. Even though they plan on making the firmware available to the community as open source, it's unlikely that will result in more recent versions of Android running decently on such old hardware.

Just yesterday, they blogged about how great it would be for sheet music, but I'm left disappointed by the refresh during inking and seeming lack of accuracy. They don't try to write fingerings and music they try to hand write looks sloppy, like they can't draw small enough to even get notes into a staff space accurately. But watch and see what you think:

I was quite tempted to pre-order one to play with, but while the $699 asking price is better than the Sony Digital Paper, it's still no small chunk of change.

If you want to see more, check out the Indiegogo page and watch the intro video below.

All the Android music readers I'm not using

If you search the Google Play store for sheet music reader, you'll turn up lots of options. Unlike the multitude of readers for the iPad however, the selections for Android are mostly useless. Here are the ones I've tried and the deal breakers that resulted in prompt uninstalls. There are two main types of readers, ones that are connected to a digital publisher, and ones that let you read your own music. 

You'll also see lots of apps for music composition and notation as well as apps to teach music reading and improve sight reading. I'll look at some of those in another post.

In the BYOM (Bring Your Own Music ) category:

The simplest of the readers also has the simplest name - Sheet Music.
It can display music stored locally on your device or SD card and can also connect to Dropbox. And it can auto scroll the music at a set-able speed. That's it. No bookmarking, no set lists, no library management, no annotation, no editing, just scrolling display.

The slightly more feature full Orpheus does all of those things (minus auto scrolling) and includes set lists and basic annotation tools. There is no way to create a bookmark or otherwise define a location in a large PDF, so each tune has to be brought in as its own file. The real deal breaker here is that the annotation is limited to one very fat red pen. You cannot change the color, nor can you change the thickness. The developer has addressed this in the FAQ's - Orpheus is built on the muPDF tools and as such, is limited to those tools. So, unless there are plans to rewrite Orpheus from the ground up with a new PDF engine (highly unlikely), the annotation tools will always be limited to this unusably fat red pen.

And in the Read Only Music From Our Service category:

Music Notes
The app is an extension of the online store. They have some interesting music - most notably nice arrangements of pop music useful for gigging groups and student ensembles, but selection is otherwise limited and expensive. Even if I were to buy a few pieces from MusicNotes the publisher, I would most likely put those PDFs in my Dropbox and open them in the reader I'm using for everything else (MobileSheetsPro).

It should be noted that music from MusicNotes does have some neat tricks that uploaded PDFs can't do. You can change key and tempo and some music supports karaoke-style light up as you go notes.

VSheetMusic
This is an extension app of the virtualsheetmusic.com service. I did purchase an annual membership some time ago and downloaded lots of nice clean PDFs of solo and chamber music. Yes, I could have downloaded everything for free from IMSLP, but the clean formatted PDFs were worth the small annual fee to me. Sadly, larger collections are not free with the annual membership. But, now that my membership has expired, I can't use the app to sync songs I've downloaded in the past. So, once again, I'm going to just take PDFs I've downloaded from this service, drop them into my Dropbox, and open them MobileSheetsPro.

I should also mention that both of these publisher's apps simply open the website for many tasks, like purchasing more music, so they really offer nearly zero value over just opening the website in a browser and using another app to display the PDFs after you've downloaded them.

So, what am I using? MobileSheets. Go get it. It does everything and then some (I'm still poking around and finding new things even after performing with it a few times now.) There's even a free version that's only limited in library size so you can really poke at all the features to see if it will work for you. Seriously, if you have an Android tablet and even a passing interest in using it for music you need MobileSheets.