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(More customer reviews)This is a love/hate review. I love the concept, but hate the execution.
I play a wide variety of music, with several different bands. Over the years, I have formatted over 1000 song (in Word) for printing lyrics and chords in BIG print so that the whole band (or at least the vocalists) can read from the chart. Hauling all 20 of my music binders to each gig is just not practical, so I usually ended up printing custom gig binders for each gig. But then there was always someone who requests that one song in binder at home....
So when I saw the Freehand Systems MusicPad Pro, I figured it would pay for itself in about two months in terms of saving me time, printer cartridges, etc. So I bought one and started the LONG task of converting all of my music so that it would be readable on the unit.
Let me interject that I have a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and I'm somwhat of a computer geek and gadget freak, so my tolerance is pretty high for things that are not idiot proof. I'm writing this review for those of you who might have the misconception that this thing is easy to get working to your liking.
In converting all of my Word files to the proprietary .fh files, I had to open and print each of my document via the freehand printer driver, then re-name each file and add my tags. Figuring-out what print setting to use was quite a nightmare. (Hint: use scaling and select Freehand in your Windows print driver first). It literally took me 16 hours to go through the process of converting all my files. Freehand should be ashamed to put this on the market without some way to batch convert from any format to their .fh files.
Then there is the file management. Why in the world they decided to make this thing with a measly 35 Megs of usable internal memory is a mystery to me. Less than 1/2 of my songs fit on the internal memory. There is a USB expansion slot that I had to use. But guess what, most of the memory sticks that they include with these units DONT WORK on the MPP because of some filtering issue in the cheap USB memory sticks that they get from China (and apparently, they don't have someone checking these things before shipping them out). In fact, only a few select memory sticks will work with this device - so beware. Freehand should have included a 1GB internal memory.
The final complaint I have is the price. For what it is, and for all the headaches I've had to go through to get it working, it should sell for $300. If I would have know how difficult it was to convert all of my files, I definitely would have just purchased a tablet PC.
Having said all of the above, I am happy that I have all the conversion behind me, and that I know how to operate the thing. I will use it on a regular basis, and it will simplify my gig preparation. If you are thinking of buying one of these things, be prepared for some pain before you get to the pleasure.
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