Need help with Orpheus? You’re in the right place!
Orpheus is available on Android, iOS and Web. Sheet music is easiest to read on a tablet with large screen size and high resolution. 10″ screen is fine if you have 20/20 vision, but most musicians tend to prefer large tablets at 12″+ which is equivalent to standard paper sheet music.
Full disclaimer: I am not a retailer or expert in tablet hardware, and the available models change very quickly. I’d recommend you investigate the technical specs, read some reviews on the models you’re considering, and then visit a tablet store to try a few for yourself.
Maeve Lander is a software developer by day, trumpeter and arranger by night. She created Orpheus ~10 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.
Lee B
Will this work with older Android OS ? Like OS 4.4
Thanks
Maeve Lander
I do my best to maintain backwards compatibility but cannot guarantee it back past v5.4. We are up to v10.x now so 4.4 (released 2013) is very old indeed, by technology standards! I would strongly recommend an upgrade for performance, security and happiness 🙂
James
Hi,
I’m hoping to run Orpheus on a Viewsonic VSD243 so I may view 11×17 scores without changing their size. Do you know if the app will work in that context?
Maeve Lander
Nice! That looks impressively large and suitable for scores. I haven’t tried the Viewsonic VSD243 personally, however, I see that it runs a standard Android operating system. Orpheus should work perfectly on any Android operating system v5.4+
Avril Dale
I’m really struggling to know which tablet to buy to use with orpheus. When you say “high resolution”can you give me some idea what that would be? Thanks
Maeve Lander
A high resolution display has a higher density of pixels per inch when compared with others. High pixel density makes the image sharper and clearer, which is especially important for reading text, and music notation. The term “high definition” is used interchangeably (eg you may see an advert such as “HD screen!”)
The following are the standard definitions for HD resolutions and express the number of pixels in the display horizontally by vertically:
1280×720 (also called 720p)
1920×1080 progressive (also called 1080p)
2560×1440 (this size upwards starts to be advertised as “Retina” or 2x or 4x display)
3840×2160 (also known as 4K or UHD “Ultra high def”. This is getting into the realm of massive TV screens and very high end monitors)
5120×2880 (also known as 5K)
Basically, the higher the better! For 10″ tablets look for something no less than 1920×1080 (1080p).