iPad 2

[Daedalus]

Tell me what computer will fit on a music stand of a music keyboard and store every piece of sheet music / chord charts / lyrics / set lists a muso may have and not look stupid. OnSong + iPad becomes the perfect songbook for live stage use.

It's a good point, and there's an opening there for something like that. However you won't see too many professional musicians using them for displaying their scores - the shiny screen makes the risk of glare too great. Now, an iPad-alike and sized device with an e-ink screen would be the business...

/me runs out to patent that idea.

Interestingly, on a recent holiday in Portugal I was impressed in one restaurant to have the winelist handed to me on an iPad. Fantastic idea! just swipe through them to browse, or sort by region, grape, price etc., read about the winery and other details you don't get from the traditional paper ones...

[Daedalus]

I disagree with your comment about glare. 99% of the time the issue is not glare, the issue is playing in a club where there is almost no lighting whatsoever. The fact the iPad is backlight is actually a GOOD thing. I can also see the buttons on the keyboard to help change sounds, etc.

Fair enough, different musicians and situations I'm talking from the perspective of some classical pianists I know who can't even have their music in plastic covers because of glare. They'll usually be playing on a stage with spotlights focussed on them. The girlfriend says the same, although she's an opera singer and so more often than not she wouldn't have the score in front of her, but when she does it's off with the plastic covers again and no hope of using a shiny screen.

[Daedalus]

LOL, my Nokia's the same - no HDMI but I can use anyone's old-style camcorder cable in the headphone socket and output video to composite. I can also play my MP3s from the phone over my car stereo via Bluetooth, internet tether with Bluetooth, and use the excellent Salling Clicker (though this might be available for the iPhone too now). What I don't have is the iPhone's slick interface, smooth GUI effects and overall Appleness...

[Daedalus]

I understand having legitimate complaints about iTunes.  I've used it for years, and I personally like that it organizes and wraps a searchable database around my media files.  I'm done with maintaining a filesystem heirarchy myself.   And yes, the iDevice's display of some of this stuff is.. .awkward at best (put a compilation on an iDevce, then look at your "artists" listing -- it's a mess.) But complaining about lack of features that are actually there anyway is just silly.

Yep, select multiple files and select Get Info... and you can change as many or as few files as you like. Combine that with the near-instant search (more of a filter than a search IMHO) and it's quite easy to edit metadata as you like. And as for the filesystem heirarchy, it's an optional feature, but I really like it. So much in fact that I've replicated it in my own music player for the Amiga, along with the separate database and metadata handling. For the compilations, there's a checkbox - just select the album and check it and it'll reorganise them all. That also works for tracks which have featured artists, and to get them to all show up just use the "Album artist" field.