Sheet music viewer for mac?

January 24, 2010 8:41 AM

How can I view sheet music on my mac?

I am trying to learn the piano and bought a keyboard yesterday. I found this great site, and would like to use the PDFs there to play, without printing them.

It looks too small on my screen if I zoom out, and only the top half of the page is visible if I zoom in to a comfortable level. I've tried turning my laptop sideways (it fits the screen then), but it's both at an awkward angle and rests in a very unstable position.

I just want something that will make the PDFs scroll on an interval (continuous scrolling would be annoying and difficult to read, I presume). Do you guys have any suggestions?

posted by Alec Loudenback to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Unfortunately, Preview doesn't support AppleScript for some reason, so that won't work, but if you install Adobe Acrobat Reader you can turn on 'scroll automatically.' It should be under the View menu. Note that you'll have to open the PDFs in the actual Reader program; auto-scrolling doesn't work inside the web browser plugin. I don't know if it's continuous or interval-based, but you can adjust the speed up and down with the arrow keys.
posted by jedicus at 10:10 AM on January 24, 2010 [1 favorite]

Also, check out the program Synthesia which is geared towards beginners to and provides automatic sheet scrolling when you purchase the "educational" extension.
posted by knz at 11:51 AM on January 24, 2010

I don't mean to be presumptuous, but this sounds like a perfect use case for the iPad, not to add to your expenses but it's something to keep in mind.
posted by Brainy at 8:31 PM on February 1, 2010