Custom Built Bluetooth Pedals

It is fascinating the snippets of information you pick up when dealing with a support request for Power Music. One such example was when David Castator contacted us about deactivating some old Power Music installations. This led on to a discussion about other music display software where he casually mentioned that he build his own Bluetooth page turner pedals – interesting I thought!

He then said that he had built a pedal that can control several tablets or PCs from one pedal – VERY interesting!

After further communication with David I asked him to write an article about the pedals he has built. So here it is, in David’s own words.

Any active musician that utilizes a Laptop, tablet, All-in-One and a digital (music) software package understands the need for a foot pedal to turn pages forward and backwards. I have used many of the wired and wireless models on the market. All of which turn sheet music pages forward or backwards on the computer to which they are attached.

My needs began to grow, ie. playing background music, turning to the last song of a play list or to the first song of a playlist etc., etc. As those needs began to increase, the foot pedals on the market did not. You needed to live with page forward or page backward – you could throw a switch manually on the pedal and maybe get it to do one or two more options, but your options were Read more...

Updated Blog Post – Review of Page Turners

Back in December last year I wrote “A Review of Page Turners – Not the Human Variety“. Since then there have been a couple of new pedals launched and one is no longer being manufactured. This is an update to that article.

So if you are thinking of moving to electronic music display or are already a user, I thought a review of the current crop of (non-human) page turners might be helpful.  I am only reviewing ones I have personal experience of and the opinions expressed in this blog post are mine. These pedals all work really well with Power Music and most other music display apps.  If you have other experiences with page turners please feel free to post a comment.

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Synchronised Page Turning with Windows PCs

Questions about synchronised page turning in Power Music are something that pop-up from time to time on our Support Desk or in the Cambron Forum.

Of course if you are using the Power Music App or Power Music Reader on iPads then this feature is built into iOS and setting it up in Power Music is a trivial matter – see this Support Article

However, setting up synchronised page turning on Windows PCs is not a trivial matter. We don’t implement it in Power Music Professional but I decided to give myself a challenge recently when a user asked the question again. And guess what?  I succeeded! Read the rest of this blog if you are interested in how I did it – but be warned you need to be a bit “techie” and it’s not really a solution I would recommend people to use.

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USB Button – For page turning and many other things!

Kevin new organSome time ago, we got an interesting request from one of our long-time Power Music users.  Kevin Bowyer is a world famous organist and now an author with six novels under his belt (find out more). He uses Power Music on a number of organs and turned the pages by tapping the touchscreen. He recently has got an impressive new 4 manual organ installed in his house.

His problem is that his arms are too short!!

The distance to the touchscreen is 35 inches so he was looking for an alternative page turner – obviously not a foot pedal as his feet are very busy on the organ pedals!

So after a bit of research we have found a company that produces a USB button which works perfectly with Power Music and hundreds of other apps.usbbutton-34 (1)

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