[moonmuse]

Been lurking here for years (awesome place!), but saw this topic and decided to delurk for a bit. I'm a long-time amateur pianist, and when I got my kindle, very soon afterwards I was thinking how nice it'd be to have something similar for sheet music.

Only took 7.5 years for it to become reality, but to me it was certainly worth the wait. Not in the least because I have a few bookcases with lots of old pianobooks that are falling apart, and piles of printed sheet music of which I have the original digital files... and digital sheet music looks so good on these screens! Early Spring cleaning. ;-)

I very seldom perform in public, so am not too worried about the Gvido suddenly dying on me during a performance. In fact, when I got the device, I found it a bit buggy, but after a software update, it's been smooth sailing all the way.

It does have a few flaws:
- No wireless transfer of sheets straight from the computer to the device, but it does work via the cloud (personal library) or via USB. My Mac didn’t much care for the USB solution (with some Android file transfer software) at first.
- The touch screen only responds to the stylus pen, so adding/changing information to the tags (Title, Composer etc.) means inputting the text via an on-screen keyboard by tapping on the letters with the pen. It's slow, even though you can save words like names of composers so it recognizes the word after adding the first few letters of the name, making it slightly less time-consuming.

Once you've got the sheets on the device and added any information, you don't ever need to do it again, though. And you can upload the sheets (including any notes you added) to your personal library, so you do have a backup in the cloud.

The Gvido is not smart enough to know when I want it to turn the pages, but the switches on the sides work fine. It took a bit of adjusting for me, because with real books, you almost blindly reach to turn the page, and here you do have to pay a bit more attention at first, otherwise you can miss the switch.

I did put a few non-sheet music pdf files onto the device, just for the heck of it. And quickly deleted them again. I don't think anybody would like to read a novel this way, and for large-size pages, a one-screen device is much better.