High Quality Scans of Public Domain Sheet Music
I recently purchased an iPad 2, the forScore app, the AirTurn BT-105 and ATFS-1 Footswitches (for page turning)—the first big steps into digitizing my entire music library. The main problem is that almost all of my piano books are larger than my flatbed scanner can handle, so even if I had the bindings cut I still wouldn’t be able to feed the loose pages through the auto document feeder. There’s the option of having Kinkos or OfficeMax doing the scanning for me, but they charge $0.20 – 0.25 per page. A large format scanner starts at $2499.
I was lamenting to my friend, Tom, about this and brilliantly pointed out that most classical music is public domain and that somebody has to have already scanned all of the stuff and put them online. Of course, a few minutes of Googling from the both of us produced tons of sites. Thus far, the one I like the most is Cantorion.
The scans and transcriptions are high in quality, and the community seems very strong and involved. Their collections include scores for multiple instruments (and sometimes full orchestra!). So far, I’ve found PDFs of most of my collection (e.g. Chopin, Liszt, Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, etc.). I’m confident I won’t have any problems finding the rest.
Here are some other resources that we found that I haven’t researched but look very promising:
- The Open Directory Project
- The International Music Score Library Project
- The Sheet Music Archive
- PianoFiles
Thanks for the help, Tom!
App Store Expense Monitor
All those $0.99 apps in the iTunes App Store make impulse purchases irresistible. It’s easy to rationalize (hey, gum is more expensive), and therefore, very dangerous.
The App Store Expense Monitor is a handy, free app that scans your mobile application directory and looks up the prices of all the apps you’ve purchased. Granted, it looks up the current prices, so anything you might’ve gotten free or for sale won’t reflect such. You can edit the prices if you want, though.
Even with the inflated total, I still can’t believe how much I’ve spent on apps.
via Wetfish via Lifehacker
Dropbox – Free Syncing, Revision Control and 2GB
I’ve read about Dropbox awhile back and the general consensus seems to be of awesomeness with whipped cream and a cherry on top. Even though I’m already a heavy JungleDisk user, you can’t argue with something that is free and easy to use, so I gave it a shot.
Dropbox runs on Windows, Linux and Mac, makes file sharing very easy and (here’s what won me over) has simple revision control just in case you accidentally overwrite or delete anything. I can see using this for collaboration on a project for users who don’t want to deal with conventional revision control systems like CVS or Subversion.
Give it a test drive. Or at least take look at the screenshot tour or screencast.
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