dipping a toe in digital sheet music

It never occurred to me until recently that you can use a tablet for sheet music, but yesterday the outer page (the cover is already long gone) to the previously-mentioned Robbins Collection of 200 Jigs, Reels, and Country Dances actually fell off, and the paper was never that great to begin with and that was about 60 years ago. They're the kind of music you can find online, but each one will have to be searched up individually, like Belles of Edinboro', Comin' Through the Rye, Johnny's Wedding (as "Johnnie's Made a Wedding O't") and Cruiskeen Lawn (as Cruiskeen). In the meantime though, I just took pictures of all the pages with songs on them I liked.

See, I realize what I need is an ebook reader app or the like, because they have the functionality where the screen doesn't snooze while they're active; but since as far as I can tell no ereaders have an extension for music xml files (.musicxml or .mxml), they'd have to be in pdfs for that. Of course that's no less information than a photograph, but it's also obviously not the ideal digital sheet music solution. I mean I don't personally need the ability to compose and score stuff, but I know that's gotta be what the usual software is doing. As far as I can tell though, there's nothing that will take scans of old sheet music and pull the music information out of them like those text-scanners (imperfectly) do for books - not that I really need that function either, but it would have been cool.

So the ecosystem of digital music notation applications is mostly for composers and arrangers and the like, and therefore it has to be super full-featured at the top end, which means it's private and there are competing proprietary formats, of course, and none of them use the same ones for their extra features as you find if you search the app store for a mobile one; but they can import and export musicxml files. And I downloaded a free program that lets you do that, actually, because the book of Jewish folk songs I mentioned before has some very bizarre notation choices that make it nearly impossible to read in places, but unlike the Celtic and English folk music from the Robbins collection, sheet music of the Yiddish stuff is mostly not available online for free; some of the songs you can find recordings or paid downloads, some just mentions of which books you could look in. They also have very short and simple melodies, so I already did like five of them this afternoon. I stopped myself before falling into Flow and forgetting to eat and stuff though.

I will probably just bundle the pictures into pdfs in the meanwhile until I get around to hunting down digital music for all the other stuff I want to use though.