My piano teacher, who only lives in the analogue world of music, was looking for a music app for a tablet, the director of the local music school recommended forScore, showed it to me, I was impressed and suggested it to my piano teacher. The only problem, it needs an pricy iPad (and a subscription?). Then I discovered the IMSLP app and thought it might offer a more economic solution on an Android tablet. Although I am an IMSLP subscriber I had not heard of it before. So it is now installed on my Samsung Tab SM-T805 (Android 6.0.1) and my Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra SM-G988B/DS (Android 13).
The basic functions are great: download from the IMSLP library and play. The page turns are lightning quick if you disable the animation, and the jump feature works really well. After playing around with the app I came across the following difficulties:
(The following comments apply to both devices. The screenshots are from the tablet. Of course the screen of the S20 is too small for practical purposes.)
- On the Samsung Tab it is only possible to import scores from the device's Gallery, the Sound Picker, Dropbox or Google Drive (screenshot). The Gallery option does not allow me to locate other locations on the device where I already have a lot of PDF from various sources including IMSLP that I would like to use. With the newer S20 I can access other locations. Is there anything I can tweak on the Samsung Tab to access all the files on the device? If this is something to do with the Android version, what is the lowest version that would give access to all the files on the device?
- During annotation text entry, the letters of the entered text appear twice with slightly different spacings making it very difficult to read and correct longer texts (see screenshot).
- In annotation mode the flat and double-flat accidentals appear two notes lower than the location pointed to. (I am using a bluetooth mouse as I do not possess a pen for the tablet, so maybe the behaviour is different between the two.) The other three accidentals appear at the expected location at the tip of the mouse pointer.
- The picker for the accidentals, loudness and other expression marks shows the symbols smaller than they actually appear in the score (screenshot). If I use the slider to adjust the size to match the score, the symbols in the picker are so tiny as to be almost unreadable - for me at least. Maybe the picker symbols could be shown in a larger size and the selected symbol in an additional window next to the picker at the size it would appear in the score?
- I could not find a way to move annotations symbols such as the accidentals or the crescendo / decrescendo arrows once they have been entered. It would be a nice feature to have. The only option appears to be erase and try again. I was able to move the annotation texts, though.
