The Annotations tab allows you to add various freehand annotations to a music page. It has the following features:

  • A drawing tool chooser
  • A color swatch that can be used to select the pen color
  • A slider to select the pen size
  • A slider to select the opacity (so you can add transparent annotations as shown in the screen shot below)
  • A button that clears all the annotations on the page (use the SVG editor to remove/modify specific annotations)
  • Your original music files are never modified. All the annotations are always saved separately.

For anything more that the most basic annotations, you will want to download and use the free Inkscape SVG editor from http://www.inkscape.org which can be easily integrated with VirtMus.

After you've downloaded and installed Inkscape, open the Tools->Options dialog box and enter the location of the inkscape.exe program in the SVG Editor field. If you installed Inkscape using the default settings, the path should be something like: C:\Program Files\Inkscape\inkscape.exe

To use Inkscape to edit a page, first select the music page you wish to edit/annotate in the PlayList Window tab (it's not enough to have the page shown in the annotations window, it needs to be selected in the PlayList window tab), then click on the last button shown on the toolbar in the screenshot below (or use the MusicPage->Edit Annotations menu item). Inkscape will launch and automatically load the selected music page and any annotations that have been entered so far. Edit things as desired. When done, save the changes and exit Inkscape. VirtMus should now pick up the annotations you've done in Inkscape. Make sure you save the song since the annotations for each page are saved as part of the song.

Note that once you've launched the SVG editor, VirtMus will block until you exit the SVG editor.

screenshot