Unrealbook App Reviews

I got a new iPad recently and restored everything from a backup which didn’t select “set list” mode automatically. I was totally confused and Aron personally helped me figure it through emails on New Years Eve! Thank you.

I have used this app since it came out! It is my go to iPad app for all of my gig material including lyric sheets, real book PDFs, fake book pdfs, sheet music PDFs, and even hand written arrangement PDFs. I have over 1100 songs in the easy to use gig libraries with custom set lists I can do o the fly. It works for me as a single or I can share lists with other musicians on the gig if they have the same app — unRealBook is the real thing!

I have had my unrealBook since 2015. Prior to purchasing it I was like so many people who still struggle with books, lighting, and searching tediously for a song. I am using many features of this book. Of course the alphabetized songs, song lists, linking songs to PDFs, highlighting, adding text, indexes, recording, creating lyrics, etc. I play music with a kanikapila group and this is a tremendous asset. Most importantly, whenever I have difficulties with my indexes Aron has always responded quickly and was most helpful in fixing my problems. Thank you for a great tool and HELP.

I use scanner for me and export it directly into UnReal Books. Very easy.

I've used Unrealbook for several years. It has proven to be the best music storage app in the business. Nothing compares. Love it!

I’ve been using this app since 2012. It has never failed me on the gig. It gets better with each update too. I highly recommend this app!

I love the way it works! I’ve been very satisfied with what it does and how it helps me as a professionally musician on-the-go!

Love this - a music Director told me about it and it has exceeded my expectations. I would call it perfect except, when selecting editing features, it tells you EVERY StINKING time that your editing (which is annoying) and makes you reselect it over and over instead of just allowing you to stay in that mode until you select something else. How bout it guys? Other than that.... buy this program! You wont be disappointed... maybe just a bit annoyed. 😃

It took a while for me to learn some very advanced features. I have been using this app for over 3 years, and would be lost without it. Several musician friends have this app now and are loving it as well.

We've used it for years for our worship band member ministry.

I like it a lot, i have showed this app to other friends

Lots of great concepts and ideas are in the app, but unfortunately I just don’t feel safe reliably using it. Trying to export anything with annotations crashes the app every...single....time.

I’ve been using this App for a couple of years now and I can’t say enough about it! It was referred to me by another Musician I play with who just raved about it...and once I purchased it I understood why. First and foremost, it allowed me to replace a 4” Ring Binder of Music with an iPad...so it’s way easier to access all of my Charts. In addition, there are so many great features...such as being able to create “Set Lists” from my Library of Charts, which meant no more flipping around through 4” of Music to find the next song. Also, the App allows for the use of a Bluetooth Pedal to facilitate “hands free” page turning. But the feature I like the best is being able to “link” an MP3 File of the Song I’m playing right to the PDF Chart so that I can access both Files from the same Page. I’ve had to contact the developer (Aron Nelson) on two occasions...and I’ve received nothing short of “world class” Customer Service from him on both occasions. If you are a Musician who does any playing at all by way of reading Charts / Music...you absolutely have to get this App. Ken S. / Los Angeles Area

The instructions on how to get ANYTHING in to this app are not helpful. I have tried on numerous occasions to import music I already have into it and have only been successful by accident. It is extremely frustrating and so because of this I cannot use it at all.

PROS: No problem loading and displaying large files, such as a RealBook. I LOVE the bookmarks feature which allows you to select a specific page within a PDF, such as a single song in a RealBook, and creates a brand new song entry in the master list for that specific song. It will skip right to that page without any need for skipping ahead, and even allows you to place that in a set list. Very useful for large PDFs with no index. Speaking of indexes, you can create indexes with unrealBook. CONS: support for AirTurn pedals is quite limited, and doesn't work with hotspots, such as for DS and Codas UPDATE: AirTurn DOES work, though no options for more than two pedals available (or easy to find) BUG: in Landscape mode, half page scrolling is skipping sections. For example, going from bottom of a page, rather than jumping to top of next page, it skips to bottom of next page instead. Please fix. I have to use forScore until this is addressed

Real book has been the "go to" for our small church worship team. I love the flexibility and the image ability of the program to help tie our team together. The printing capability is awesome. I do wish the writing symbol would come up easier and stay between pages when I have to edit a song. Also that the plus sign at the bottom of the page would stay on so I can easily add songs. I am the keyboardist and notating is very important for me. Gathering all my songs in one place from CCLI is great.

I like the app, but the all gray, low contrast, buttonless interface is sometimes frustrating to use. Wish the appearance had more contrast and buttons that look like buttons, for less thinking on the fly. I much more enjoy using this app on my first generation iPad, which is not expandable past iOS 5, and where the previous appearance of this app is much more intuitive and easier to use.

All in all, a pretty good program. It has something of a learning curve which is challenging. I would love to see the culvers put in an option to rotate the music. Sometimes you have to go back to Acrobat in order to rotate it and re-download it. Would be wonderful to be able to do that from within the application

Have found this app to be incredibly useful! You can add Any number of real books and have thousands of tunes one touch away. I've been adding all the original music people send via email and then bring the iPad to the gig. Indexes make it easy to separate music for different bands and easy to find when you need it. It has changed the way I practice and made for less stress on the gig, five stars!

I have been using unrealBook for the last four years, in addition I am using a PageFlip Cicada bluetooth pedal to turn the pages of my charts in unrealBook hands free. Aron, the developer, is very helpful and answers the questions personally and promptly. He is super professional and has helped me out many times when I got stuck. Two thumbs up for this great app and the support!!!

Using RB for a variety of documents. Easy to use, find files, notes, etc. great app!

Not the easiest app to master but if you put in the time you can see and use it's powerful features. Link lyrics and/or music notation to ITune files for easy practice and make set lists for on stage...features seem endless.

I've been using this app as a solo guitarist for 5+ years. I honestly don't know how I got along without it!!!!!! THANKS!!!!!

I hate this app it doesn't let me download any music on here!!! I wanted something that organizes my music and instead I got another iTunes I want my money back

So far I've found nothing it doesn't do well.

Have used it the last three years as choir director of my church. Also am using it in a choral group I belong to. I am able to keep the two separate with the list feature plus plan my weekly lists for church services. Don't know what I would do without it. I find it easy to learn, highlight, make notes, check tempo, even record and play back. I would recommend it for any musician who is playing or singing in a group/groups and has a lot of music to keep track of.

I learned of UnrealBook at a Dulcimer workshop and have used it since. Combined with the larger screen IPad, its ideal to store all the tabs involved instead of heavy, bulky notebooks of music. Also, other members in my group use it and we are able to exchange music with ease. I am still learning of the various features available. The technical support system with this app makes it invaluable. I recommend it highly.

Haven't gone too deep as I just purchased this app, but it's setup was much easier than its' competitors, importing of PDFs (while you still have to use your PC to import them, hence the 4-star rating) was relatively simple with iTunes. The menu bar is also a nice, simple,accessible layout.

I've been using unrealbook since the first version. It's worth 100x the asking price and has revolutionized the way we perform.

Just got this app today...told by a friend of mine that I'm playing a gig with tomorrow. Already imported all my PDF lyrics and have built and rearranged tomorrow's song list. Was very easy and quick... both to learn how and to do. My ONLY complaint is Unreal Book is not available for android because my droid table is the one I'm used to using when playing out...so MAKE AN ANDROID VERSION and I'll happily buy it too! But for now I guess I'll have to use my iPad for my band and when playing with friends at small bars, coffee houses, nursing homes and where ever else they'll hire me. LOL. Fantastic app!

It's perfect for what i need when i'm playing. I can group my SONGS for what ever gig i'm playimg. I like the page turn when i'm practicing at home But i want to get the air turn when i'm playing some place i can turn the page with my foot so i dont have to stop on a super set. Thanks UNREAL BOOK, 👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽

Unreal book has been totally reliable and met all my songbook needs. I bring in material from many different sources and have no problem organizing them. Highly recommended.

I use this app every week at church to lead worship. It's simple to import a PDF in and then use a foot pedal to turn pages hands free. Couldn't ask for anything else.

We use this in our praise team at church. I love it overall. My zoom wont work and it doesn't work well horizontally you have to keep it vertical for it to use all the functions. It's easy to down load any PDF file and we send each other stuff all the time through emails and just save to unreal books. It works very well playing my music from my iPad too so I can listen to the song at the same time. Except for those few changes I love it. And so does our whole praise team.

I use this app with a collection of jazz fakebooks. Once I learned how to create and troubleshoot index files, it became the easiest way to store my sheet music collection and to quickly find a song. It simply works, and it works simply.

I have used this app every week for years and it is flawless. Extremely stable and useful in many ways. It has completely spoiled me for playing from printed scores. I highly recommend it!

I adopted an under used original iPad to hold the music for several organizations I play with. There might be another solution that works with iOS 5.1 or earlier that can support an original AirTurn pedal, but I don't know about it. Fortunately, I don't need to know. From scanned music pages of 200-300 dpi black and white ( to save storage space ) I have hundreds of pages available. I can build set lists for each of the organizations so that I can see only what I need for a single performance. Where the scanned work has more pages in the PDF file than I need, I can configure a bookmark to show only a range of pages when moving to that piece in the set list. You can reorder the set list any time or make a new one at a moment's notice It has ways to enter rehearsal notes in a page without affecting the original file. The only gripe I have is an occasional crash can occur if I zoom in too far to enter my notes. With the recent update, it's more stable than before. There are many more features that I can actually use now since the update. It's inexpensive for the features you get. I recommend it!

Amazing for jazzmen, you just have to put your realbooks pdf and the lists that you can find on the Unrealbook website with iTunes and you will be able to search standards and get the score in one second !

This is a must have program if you are a musician fumbling with the old music books and charts. You scan in your charts and they are at your fingertips easily accessible. It's similar to how the iPod organized your music library...don't hesitate, get organized today. Also, if you need any tech advice, Aron, the developer, answered my questions in a helpful and timely way.

This app may be ok if you work with single song PDFs. But for jazzers who need easy access to FakeBook compilations, this app completely missed the mark. You have no way to set a file as a compilation of tunes. So the only option you have is to bookmark the page. There are better options out there for managing FakeBook compilations, like DeepDish GigBook, or iGigBook.

Beautifully organizes all my charts, allows me to control other iPads from a master iPad NO OTHER APP ALLOWS THIS to my knowledge. Have used it on gig with my band---calling up charts and turning pages on several iPads. Organizes into lists for easy access to charts for different bands. I will be using this app for years to come.

I have been using Unrealbook for the last couple of years and it is such a luxury for multi-page charts! I recently upgraded to an iPad Pro and the extra size is all I could have hoped for and more. My experience with support from Aron could not be any better - he promptly helped resolve a technical issue with a Bluetooth pedal. The app is invaluable to me and I have converted several fellow musicians to Unrealbook after they see it in action. Thank you Aron for a great product!

unrealBook is a good tool to use to organize sheet music, once you determine how to navigate thru functions it works. Needs better annotation tools for marking up notes and adding text on the fly when using for rehearsal. I like forScore better. Out of 3 sheet music apps I use 1. forScore - good annotation tools, good set list, file and attribute organization, metronome interface 2. unRealBook - see above 3. DeepDish Gigbook - kinda clumsy and slow

Great app to keep your off sheet music in. User interface isn't perfect but easy to learn. Great for the price.

What it does (which really is just organize PDFs), it does well. However, the UI is dated and poorly organized. You'll figure it out, but it could be better. My biggest complaint is the means of getting PDFs into the app. Requiring iTunes sync was fine five years ago, but not anymore. Go to your computer, download the PDF, drag and drop to iTunes, sync your device and it shows up. Lots of ceremony when I'd really like to just give it URL or use a Safari extension. Would I recommend it? Sure, but it sure has a "knocked it out in a weekend" look to it.

I have friends who have other electronic music books and have all kinds of issues with them, not me. This program hums along beautifully always doing what i want and need. Really like it. Two thumbs up!

My entire keyboard rig is controlled from the simple act of calling up a chart in unrealBook! As I am the musical director for many different acts, a choir director and church musician, the Play List feature is invaluable! The developer is very responsive to update features and that's rare in the app world. Highly recommended!

This is the best music reader app period! The developer is clearly a working musician, listens to his community and responds with very useful updates constantly. All my musician friends use it (thanks to me) and love it too. It has saved us a lot of confusion when performing on stage with music, especially multi-page complex pieces. Having a single Master iPad and several Slave iPads is just brilliant. For those that are using this app for 1st time, highly recommend going through the Online Manual to see all the things this app can do after you have your initial workflow setup.

I like it. Use it every day. I can make set list(s) but I just put a combo list of tunes that I play the most in one big list. For me that's about 200 tunes. Works for me.

I love this app, but one drawback is not being able to print the songs. I would give it 5 stars if this problem is corrected in future updates. I use the app for all my dulcimer songs.

There's a help system and you'll need it to find things that should be intuitively findable because of the cutesy menu names and structures that show poor organization. It's powerful and useful, but there should not need to be a steep learning curve to use what is essentially a pdf viewer. If I could change one thing, I would add a setting to allow full-screen view and utilize instead of waste all the available real-estate. Kudos on being the only decent 2-up/side-by-side page-swipe app I've been able to find. Very good. Haven't had any luck recently with my Pageflip Firefly, but I'm assuming that's still some OS9 issue.

Buggy app with iPad IOS 10.3.3. Constantly rebooting iPad to get keyboard to pop up. Changes text of file names on import. Will not recognize some keyboard characters. Duplicates import files under different name. Creates blank page files. Difficult to set up with PageFlip Pedal Controller. Intuitive rating is very poor and support topics not very helpful.