VirtMus

VirtMus (virtual music) is a free application that allows the user to display sheet music and flip pages without removing the hands (or feet) from the instrument the music is performed on. It is very useful during concerts and practice sessions.

Music stands are usually able to accomodate at most a single book or 2-3 pages of loose leaf music at once. When performing a longer piece of music, the musician must often move one of the hands away from the instrument to turn the pages. This interupts the performance and breaks the flow of music especially when the page turn occurs during a musically demanding passage.

This software allows the user to create "songs" out of sheet music images obtained from a scanner, digital camera, or pdf, and "PlayLists" out of the "songs". During a performance, the user can simply press a mouse button to move to the next / previous page or press various keyboard keys to advance the music.

USB foot switches are available which emulate mouse button presses thus freeing the hands to play the instrument. Even without a FootSwitch, using a laptop display avoids the problem of books that don't stay open, or loose leaf pages that fly off the music stand when the wind (or HVAC unit) blows.

What is new in this release:

• The ability to undo annotations was added.
• A double-click or a right-click on the thumbnails now displays them in the annotation window.
• Some operations were multi-threaded to speed things up.
• More PDFs are now handled properly.
• The display of help in Linux was improved.
• Rendering of rotated PDF pages was fixed.

What is new in version 2.51:

• This release adds support for using PDF files as music pages sources.
• It also includes a small number of usability improvements.

What is new in version 2.00:

• Features added:
• A MS-Windows installer that can be used instead of the zip distribution
• Improved start-up for large collections
• Improved rendering of page transitions in the live window (in come cases the improvement is quite dramatic)
• Songs can now be copied or moved between playlists
• Songs can be re-ordered a number of different ways
• Modified Songs or PlayLists are shown in italicized font
• Property sheets have been added for Songs and PlayLists
• PlayLists, Songs and MusicPages can now be renamed in place
• Added clipboard support and Edit menu entries
• Added memory usage graph in the tool bar
• A new script was contributed by one of the users to convert from PDF directly to a song.