Use your iPad as a Sibelius control surface

If you have an iPad and are interested in using it as a control surface for Sibelius 6 or the new Sibelius 7, then Sibelius user Tobias Escher (@NovatlanSound) has a treat for you.

Sibelius Control is a layout for an app called Custom Keypad, which:

…allows you to create custom keypads that you can use to control your computer over the network from your iOS device. You start by creating a keypad layout, which includes buttons and other controls that you can easily arrange and customize. Then for each control, you define which actions to send to your computer, when the control is touched. Actions can be keystrokes, such as keyboard shortcut commands, or mouse clicks such as the left, right or middle mouse buttons. Once you are connected to your computer, simply touch the controls on your keypad to send the actions to your computer over the network!

Tobias has spent a great deal of time examining his own Sibelius workflow and designing a Custom Keypad layout that puts the things he uses most often at his fingertips, and now he’s making it available for everybody to use:

Sibelius Control is perfect for working with a portable computer or far away from a computer screen. I just love taking my iPad with Sibelius Control to my Stage Piano and entering notes from across the room!

It also is the perfect companion to Sibelius for switchers from a different application such as Finale, as it clearly labels all the keys without you having to learn all the shortcuts in a short amount of time.

Getting Custom Keypad to work with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion is tricky right now due to some changes in the way Screen Sharing works in Apple’s latest operating system, so you may run into some speed bumps on Lion, but on Snow Leopard you should be good to go.

Check it out, and let Tobias know what you think.