Need help with Orpheus? You’re in the right place!
For best results aim for an Android tablet with large screen size and high resolution.
For those looking for something larger:
The main thing to look out for when it comes to sheet music is high resolution – that will help a great deal when reading notation. Also make sure you scan your music in black and white mode for the best resolution and contrast ratio.
Full disclaimer: I am not a retailer or expert in tablet hardware so all I can do is mention the tablets that I know have appropriate size screens and resolution for sheet music. I’d recommend you investigate the full technical specs, read some reviews on those shortlisted, and then visit a tablet store to try a few for yourself.
Maeve Lander is a software developer by day, jazz trumpeter by night. She created Orpheus ~6 years ago, when Android was first born. It has gone through iteration over the years, but has always held true to the original vision; a minimalist sheet music reader that just does one thing, really well.
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Ron Vermillion
Hi there,
Just ran into something I thought I should share just in case it would help someone else.
In an effort to run a larger monitor screen I’ve tried a couple of big screen tablets. A Nabi and most recent a HP Slate. Samsung also has a biggie (17″) coming out but none of the big screens (over17″) will rotate the view to portrait.
The designers of these things seem to have agreed that no one would want to run them up on edge in portrait mode.
After much agonizing over how to deal with this, a simple work around occurred. I scan my leadsheets and then rotate them 90 degrees and save them.
Then when I pull the images up I can simply rotate the screen to portrait and everything works fine.
Very best of regards,
Ron Vermillion , CEO
Maeve
Thanks for the tip Ron, much appreciated.
Stefan
A lot of colleagues of mine use Ipads for their sheet music, which works fine. Those have a size of 9,7 inch, and a 3:4 aspect ratio, which is quite similar to that of sheet music. Most other tablets have a 16:10 aspect ratio, which is nice for movies, but not for music.
Samsung recently released the Samsung Tab A and Tab S2, both of which have the same aspect ratio as the Ipad. I bought the Tab A, because it has a touchscreen pen which makes writing much easier. The lower resolution (same as the Ipad 1 and 2) is no problem, the music is displayed very sharp.
Richard Barbour
Does Orpheus run on the Google 12.3″ Slate tablet? It’s supposed to run Android apps but apparently some of them don’t work well. I’m currently running on a Lenovo 10″ tablet but want something larger that isn’t as expensive as the Ipad.
Maeve Lander
Yes, Orpheus should work fine on Google Chromebooks. I’m planning on further optimising for Chromebook in the next release because there are several 12″ + sizes available and it seems like a potentially cost effective device choice for sheet music reading.