Did I already mention that I love the iPad? A great gadget, especially for a musician. I’ve copied PDFs of all my Real Books and other sheet music to the iPad, so I don’t need to bring tons of books to rehearsals or gigs anymore.

But much more convinient and versatile than the Real Book PDFs is Massimo Biolcati’s iPhone App iRealBook (which I already have recommended here before). It has been updated recently to an universal app, so it now makes use of the full screen size of the iPad. I prefer the landscape view over the portrait view, because you always have the song list handy on the left side.

Making good things even better isn’t easy. But with version 3.0, iRealBook has got a player feature, which I really like. The player creates surprisingly good play along accompaniments for all the library songs (more than 900) and properly formatted user created songs in iRealBook. Don’t expect a really natural sounding band – but compared to my old Band-in-a-Box software, the “iRealBook Band” really swings and the instruments sound less artificial.