Using Virtual Music Stand is very simple. A piece of music is held in a Score file. Create a new score and import your music into it. This can be done via a scanner, through directly importing images, through PDF or loading text-based guitar tablature.

Virtual Music Stand makes no attempt to read the imported music. It will therefore work with printed, hand-written or tablature music. So how does it know the structure of the music?

You tell it. Just once - after you've imported the music. The screenshot above shows the first page of a score. To record the scroll position (the proportion of the visible page), just press the spacebar. Then scroll to the next position. Press the spacebar to record. Select the next page. Press the space bar ...

Virtual Music Stand will scroll or move to any point in the score, allowing you to specify repeats and codas. You just need to record the page positions once, and save the file. Then you can happily play and forget turning pages forever.

So how do you tell it to scroll?

There are two ways. Manual and automatic scrolling.

Manual scrolling requires you to click a mouse button or press a key on the keyboard. As a guitarist, I use a laptop on the floor and use my foot to click on the mouse button (see 'Why use it?'). Alternatively, simply place your mouse or keyboard on the floor and use your foot to scroll.

Virtual Music Stand has a built in, fully configurable, audible or visible metronome to aid practise.

Whilst playing along using the metronome, you can choose to record when you scroll the page. Virtual Music Stand then knows after how many metronome clicks you scrolled the page. This information can be saved into your score and will allow Virtual Music Stand to scroll the music for you.

Automatic scrolling needs no input from you at all. Just play along to the audible or visible metronome and the pages will scroll automatically. If you slow down or speed up the metronome, the scrolling will alter accordingly.