that's an old photo of the piano in question...I thought the "coming soon" on the TV above it was rather appropriate
You may have seen my thread in the Idea Zone subforum; if you haven't, here's the plan. I have an ENORMOUS sheet music collection. I've printed about 40,000 pages of music on my faithful little Samsung ML2851ND laser printer, double-sided of course, and then bound them into books (the one on the piano in the photo above is one of my 3 Tchaikovsky books).
I have every piece written for solo piano or keyboard by around 60 different composers ranging from the late 1600's to the late 1900's. And I've got piano pieces by another 50 or 60 composers where I'm still missing much of what they wrote, but I've got at least 1/3 to 1/2 of their output for my instrument. Overall it's about 15GB of pdf files...!!
Ok...so it's a LOT. My current set of books weighs in at 300+ pounds - now only 1 shelf on one of bookcases in the photo above is empty. I don't really want to print any more music because of space and weight when it comes time to move again. And I have enough additional music to fill up probably another half a bookcase.
Enter the computer idea. About 80% of my music, maybe 90%, is free public domain pdf files from imslp.org, my own trips to libraries, etc. The rest is in real published books, and I can either scan it or find much of it online in old editions that are public domain now. I will build a relatively low-end, no frills machine whose purpose in life is to display said pdfs, full-screen, showing 2 side by side pages at a time. I can also use it, via Soundforge, to record myself playing.
The equipage? Glad you asked Overall I've only spent about $50 on it! Woo hoo!!
First, nicer but older pre-TV and pre-bookcases shot of the piano:
Pentium 4 system with 1GB PC-2100 RAM, onboard sound and video, and a 275W PSU. According to nevermind, who sold me the MB, RAM and PSU, I'll need to dismantle the PSU because its casing hits a heatsink and tends to short it. the blower on the CPU is pretty large, about 3" tall or so, and I'm thinking of getting a different HS/Fan. I *do* have an idea to do something with the one that's there...more on that if I can make the idea work. I realized I forgot to photograph the hard drive - it's an IDE 80GB Samsung I picked up in a trade with Sxrguy.
I'll be using an extra Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse:
Now for what'll make it unique. The major question that may have sprung to mind if you play an instrument is, how in the world will I turn pages?? It's all well and good to practice reaching for the page down key on the keyboard, but there's a high chance of missing it, and what does one do when there's a repeat to a prior page and one needs to use pageup?
Solution! I bought two USB footpedals from an ebay seller in Hong Kong. I'll map one to pagedown and one to pageup. Then I can just tap the footpedal when I need to turn a page. I typically use my right foot on the damper pedal, but there's only a couple pieces I play where I use my left foot on the piano pedals too so most of the time it'll be fine.
Lastly, I have an extra 21.5" Sceptre screen. It was my fiancee's screen, but she didn't like how it displayed reds....admittedly they are more of a neon orange...but hey, for BW music pages it'll work just fine. Physical dimensions of the displayed pages will be almost exactly 11" tall - smaller than standard published music books but the same size as my homemade ones. In the photo below, I left the base of the screen off. I've been keeping it in its box, and the base needs to be removed to fit it in there. The base is a MAJOR PITA to remove once it's clipped on.
Next up...I need to come up with a case design. I'm thinking of something shaped like this gorgeous wooden case from nMedia:
I lack the woodworking skills and equipment to do something like that, and I don't have $$ or space for that particular case. But I'm thinking I can maybe modify the design to fit my space, and make it out of plywood at least to start...we'll see. any advice in that area is appreciated!!