đź”— Black Friday App Deals

Every Black Friday, tons of apps go cheap or free on the App Store. I always use this opportunity to score a bunch of apps I have been waiting on, particular higher priced apps. 

The best resource I have found for keeping track of every deal is MacStories. Check out their blog post on The Best Deals for iPhone and iPad Apps, Games, and Accessories. They have already started collecting apps on sale and will be updating it all throughout tomorrow and in the coming days. It catalogues apps ranging from iOS apps to Mac apps to tech deals on Amazon. 

Happy app purchasing!!!

đź”— Spotify Buys Online Recording Studio Soundtrap

Spotify Buys Online Recording Studio Soundtrap:

STOCKHOLM — Music streaming company Spotify has bought online music and audio recording studio Soundtrap, it said on Friday, declining to give financial details of the deal.

Stockholm-based Soundtrap allows its subscribers to have an online music studio and create music together with other people in real time, its website says.

”Soundtrap's rapidly growing business is highly aligned with Spotify's vision of democratising the music ecosystem," Spotify said in a statement.

This is a really interesting deal for music technology education. Spotify is a major player in the music streaming space and is well known to the major public. I can definitely see how Soundtrap fits into Spotify’s vision. But it will be interesting to see what they actually do with it, and if it has any influence over Soundtrap’s usefulness in the music classroom.

First weeks with iPhone X

Well I’m a few weeks in with the iPhone X and so far I’m loving it.

 

Some quick thoughts in praise of the phone...

 

Touch gestures make the home button feel like something that never needed to exist (though the swipe down for control center is garbage).

 

It is arguably one of the best looking iPhones of all time (I got the silver model).

 

The entire phone is lightning fast (though some of the transition animations have frame rate issues, likely due to the buggy behavior of iOS 11).

 

Did I mention touch gestures? Swiping the bottom of the screen left and right to multitask is a dream.

 

Animoji are fun.

 

Have not spent a ton of time with the camera yet, unfortunately. But the new portrait mode lighting is really special.

 

 

Some quick concerns...

Reviews spoke highly of Face ID. I think it’s great. But it’s very much where Touch ID was upon first release. Kind of slow and unnatural. Face ID is not as flexible about how my face is positioned to it as I would like it to be. And it is not very fast.

 

I thought I would hate the Notch on the top of the screen. I do. But it is not even one percent as intrusive as I thought it would be. I rarely notice it. It is worse in landscape mode, but I just don’t ever find myself my phone that way.

đź—’ MMEA Session Notes - Working With Digital Scores

Tomorrow I will be presenting at the Maryland Music Educators Association's Fall Conference. The session I am presenting is all about Working with Digital Scores. I will be covering file management, scanning, and score reading software such as forScore. I am also going to be digging in to some of the new iPad productivity features that shipped with iOS 11 last month. If you are going to be at the conference, come say hi!

Here are the session notes for the session...

Click here to view the session notes in Evernote!

 

Working with Digital Scores Session Notes - Robby Burns - MMEA In Service, October 20, 2017

Apps for Scanning:

Apple Notes App

Evernote Scannable 

Scanner Pro

Tiny Scanner

NotateMe

Sheet Music Scanner

 

Apps for Managing Files:

Files App

Dropbox

Google Drive

Documents

Evernote

 

Apps for Working with Scores:

forScore

unReal Book

Newzik

Scorch

Notion

 

Notes on forScore:

Link to my blog post on creating indexes with forScore

 

My Book:

Digital Organization Tips for Music Teachers

Buy on Amazon | Buy on Oxford University Press

View the video trailer

 

About Me:

Robby Burns

Twitter | Blog | Podcast | Email

🔗 “The Simpsons” Composer Alf Clausen Fired After 27 Years

 â€śThe Simpsons” Composer Alf Clausen Fired After 27 Years:

Two-time Emmy winner Alf Clausen has been fired from “The Simpsons” after 27 years of providing music for Bart, Lisa, and company.


Clausen told Variety that he received a call from “Simpsons” producer Richard Sakai that the company was seeking “a different kind of music” and that he would no longer be scoring the longtime Fox hit.

This just makes me entirely sad.

đź”— Sibelius 8.7 released with Cloud Sharing, other fixes - Scoring Notes

Sibelius 8.7 released with Cloud Sharing, other fixes:

Today Avid released Sibelius 8.7, the latest update to Sibelius. The new feature in Sibelius is Cloud Sharing, which we previewed a couple of weeks ago. The update is free for all 8.x users with an active subscription or support plan. Sibelius First has been updated as well.

Sibelius users share scores online in a format that can be displayed in any browser on a modern device, regardless of whether or not the person viewing the score owns Sibelius. No extra plug-ins are necessary.

Sibelius is pretty late to the game here. I admit, this is a nice improvement upon Scorch, but Scorch was terribly out of date. The best part in my opinion is the easy web publishing, though Noteflight has had it for a while now. 

The Sibelius team would have to do a lot at this point to get me to come back to it after switching to Dorico last fall. Sibelius is still plagued with layout issues, has a horrid user interface, and performs poorly alongside all of the other professional apps on my Mac. That being said, if you are using Sibelius, this is a nice update.

🎬 Using the iOS 11 Files app makes working with Dropbox and Google Drive on an iPad smoother than ever before

As of Thursday, Google Drive Now Supports iOS 11’s Files app. Now that Google Drive and Dropbox support the new iOS 11 Files app, you can view all of your documents under one roof. This integration means that using third party cloud drives feels native to the iPad, something we have been able to experience with the Finder on macOS for years. You don’t ever even need to launch the Google or Dropbox apps again. I made a shoe video demonstrating the utility of this integration. 

The new Apple Watch Siri watch face is a dream for teachers 

Last week, Apple released watchOS 4 for the Apple Watch. With the update comes a new available watch face called the Siri watch face. The face pulls relevant data from all of your Apple apps and presents them to you as cards in chronological order based on relevance. Using the Digital Crown, you can scroll through them and see a timeline of your day. 

These cards pull data from calendar, weather, reminders, timers, alarms, sunrise, sunset, workouts, and more. My teaching schedule is complex. I teach in five different rooms, and co-teach almost 300 band students. Our programs calendar is shared with one another, our staff, and community via a complex series of Google Calendars. I have these calendars calibrated to show me only the events that display the classes that only I teach, and thus, where I need be and when. The Apple Watch displays this information simply. Until now, I have been using the modular watch face because I like how many custom complications I can fit on it. 

With the Siri face, I don’t need all these complications because most of the data I need from them shows up at the topmost card, and only when I really need to see it. The face does allow for two complications. One of the default complications is a button that launches straight into Siri. Even though one of the cards Siri watch face can display has weather, I like this to be constantly visible, so I have opted to put the Carrot Weather complication in its place. 

Do you use alarms, timers, and calendars throughout your class day? This Watch face is worth checking out. 

The Siri face shows upcoming calendar events.

The Siri face shows upcoming calendar events.

Combine calendar with alarms, timers, and other app data and this is a powerful watch face.

Combine calendar with alarms, timers, and other app data and this is a powerful watch face.

You can scroll through your day with the Digital Crown.

You can scroll through your day with the Digital Crown.

The modular face is still useful for viewing a lot of complications at once.

The modular face is still useful for viewing a lot of complications at once.

đź”— Why every orchestra is going to scrap sheet music and go digital

 Why every orchestra is going to scrap sheet music and go digital | David Taylor Music:

This summer, my orchestra took a risk. Yorkshire Young Sinfonia became the first youth orchestra in the world to become 100% digital, using iPads and an app called Newzik instead of sheet music.

Cool story. Interesting that they are using Newzik and not something like forScore. Newzik is a really cool alternative but I personally do not have a huge need for reading XML files on my iPad. Most of the scores I work with are scanned copies of original paper. There are a lot of cool things you can do with XML though, like resizing the music and having the entire layout of the score adjust itself to the size you prefer. Neat stuff.