The Problem

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.

The Solution

VirtMus 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 foot switch, 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.

See the To Do list for a number of non-critical issues and features under development or planned for the next release.

If you're looking for similar software but with a commercial or shareware license, see http://www.estandmusic.com/ .

This software was written and is being maintained by Gabriel Burca. Developers who wish to contribute should contact the author at gburca dash virtmus at ebixio dot com.