Sheet Music, without the Sheets

When musicians are performing using sheet music, they really need an extra hand to turn pages. Or a way to turn pages with their feet. Thanks to FreeHand Systems, they now have one. After a couple years of prototyping, testing -- and getting input from notorious testy professional musicians -- Freehand recently unveiled the MusicPad Pro. The product is essentially a notebook-sized electronic tablet designed to clearly display sheet music on its crisp, bright screen -- and change it with a touch of a foot pedal.

The five-pound tablet, which can be propped on a music stand, shows one page of music at a time, and music can be loaded into the machine from a scanner or by downloading from the web.

Musical pros contributed other features to the final product, including the ability to make erasable rehearsal notations on the score (with an attached electronic stylus) and to collaborate with others by sharing the same score over a network.

The price for musicians (and conductors) to make life a bit easier: $999.

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