Syncing Feeling

Jason Snell over at sixcolors.com describes a few grievances with a new feature in macOS Sierra that syncs the contents of your Mac's Desktop and Documents folder across all of your devices and optimizes storage on the device by moving files that have not been opened recently to the cloud. In particular, there are problems with syncing package files associated with professional software, even including Apple's own Logic and Final Cut Pro!

Syncing feeling: iCloud Drive in macOS Sierra:

With any luck, Apple’s hot on the case of fixing the bugs. Perhaps the teams in charge of Apple’s pro apps are working on coordinating project files a bit more aggressively. And I suspect that I might be a little responsible for this new Apple tech note, which suggests that if you’re using a pro app, you should move your projects out of synced folders or turn off Optimize Mac Storage.

Yep, that’s Apple saying that people who use pro apps should just turn off or avoid using a major new feature of macOS Sierra.

Unfortuantely, all to many signs today point to the fact that Apple is

a. not thinking about the pro user.

and

b. releasing buggy updates to their cloud services that create caution amongst users as to whether or not they should trust iCloud with their data.

New iPhone Announcement, September 7, 2016 - Reflections

Apple announced the Apple Watch Series 2, the iPhone 7, and a new set of wireless AirPods this past Wednesday. I wanted to take a hot second to jot down some quick reflections on some of the announcements. These are in somewhat chronological order.

Just one brief note: I went into watching this event without any real interest in purchasing anything announced.

Mario

Not sure what it is, but the announcement of a Mario game coming to iOS made me feel like a seven year old. It looks to have the characteristic tightness and polish I expect from Nintendo games. I will definitely buy and play this game. Also very cool that it is going to be a fixed price and not have in app purchases.

iWork

Oh boy. Anytime iWork gets mentioned, I sit up in my seat a little. It was announced that iWork is getting real time collaborative features (yeah yeah, just like Google Docs in 2007). The cool thing is that collaborators can be working on Pages, Numbers, and Keynote documents from on the web or in the native applications on Mac or iOS. As these apps are my primary tools of choice for making docs, spreadsheets, and presentations, I am pumped that Apple is working on this.

Sadly, these features depend on the reliability of iCloud sync to be awesome. If these newer features work as well as existing iWork document sync, I am going to need see them in action first hand before getting too excited.

Pokemon Go for Apple Watch

Again, I found myself surprised that one of the most exciting announcements for me was about a game. Pokemon Go is the perfect fit for Apple Watch. It will resolve every reason that I do not currently play the game often (even though I find it entertaining and aspire to play it more).

The app reconciles the fact that playing Pokemon Go is basically a workout and therefore tracks your calories and distance as you play and records this data to the Apple Health app. It tells you when Pokemon are near as you walk so that you don't have to be staring at your screen the entire time, ignoring the moment and running your battery dry.

I will play this game a ton.

Apple Watch Series 2

I was not planning to be excited about this device but it might be the most compelling thing to me about the entire presentation. Apple Watch Series 2 brings GPS, waterproofing, speed increase, and water related workouts to the watch and also has some new and cool designs.

The Nike+ version of the watch has a breathable sport band and comes with some extra software installed to help track runs and motivate the user to get outside.

I have the stainless steel version of the original Apple Watch but I have bounced around the idea of getting a cheaper aluminum model just for the work out features and speed increase. It was also announced that watchOS 3 will come out next Wednesday, September 13th. This update is advertised to improve speed so much that it will feel like a new watch. So far, reviews have indicated that the hype is real. I will wait to see how much faster my watch feels next week before deciding if I really want a the new model.

iPhone 7

Well, they really did it. They took away the headphone jack. Honestly, I think this is where the technology needs to go, but as an audio professional, I think I am going to introduce a lot of friction into my life for the next year if I early adopt this technology. I still want the ability to plug my phone into any sound system I come across, and while using a Lightning to 1/8th inch adaptor is not a huge hassle for me, I would really rather just not deal with it. Eventually I do believe the entire industry will move this way, but I really wish that in pushing things forward, Apple had gone with a standard solution like a USB C cable, not one that is proprietary like Lightning.

Audio jack aside, the new camera features on the phone look compelling and I am definitely interested in them. Maybe next time around...

AirPods

Along with the audio jack removal, Apple announced a new set of wireless "AirPods" that are designed just like the ones that come in the box, but without wires. The AirPods come in a chargeable case that charges the pods itself. As soon as you take them out of the case, they immediately pair to whatever Apple device you want to use them with (Mac, Apple Watch, iPhone) in one tap. They seamlessly pass audio from one of these devices to the other in one tap without fiddling with Bluetooth settings. They allow you to talk to Siri and get a couple hours of playback from a few seconds of charge.

If you have seen the product photography of these, the potential for loosing them is immediately obvious. That being said, I am very compelled by these devices because they are the only one in the presentation that actually solve new technological problems for me in a user friendly way. If these don't sound like garbage and fit my ears, I will definitely buy them. If you are compelled by these but fear of loosing them, Apple's headphone company, Beats, is also releasing three new wireless headphone models that use them same pairing technology as the Apple AirPods. Each of the Beats models have a wire to attach the two ear pieces together.

Conclusion

I think for me, it is looking like:

iPhone: I'll wait.

Apple Watch: See how fast watchOS 3 feels first.

AirPods: See how they sound and fit first. If the fit is bad, consider Beats.

Watch the Video Trailer for My New Book

The video trailer for my new book, Digital Organization Tips for Music Teachers, is out!

Thanks to all who helped to make it happen...

Video produced by Four/Ten Media
Narration: Terry Eberhardt
Acting: Jennifer Retterer, Cecilia Bullough, Martin Vandenberge, Robby Burns
Editing: Kevin Eikenberg
Music: Square Peg Round Hole

Yosemite Style Sibelius icon replacement for Mac

A few years back, Apple released the OS X update Yosemite for Mac, drastically changing the way that the user interface appears. The first thing you may have noticed with this transition is that the icons for various different apps changed, becoming less glossy and three dimensional, and adding distinguished color gradient effects.  

If you are anything like me, it may bother you that certain third party software developers have neglected to update their app icons. For me, Avid's Sibelius is one of the only icons I keep on the dock that does not have this modern look. It sticks out like a sore thumb. It's hideous, actually. So naturally, I changed it. 

DeviantArt has a bunch of Yosemite themed icon remakes available. Click here to download a much improved Sibelius icon, depicted below. They also have icon replacements for Pro Tools, Avid Media Composer, and tons of other apps. Following the link also includes very clear instructions on how to properly make the icon change on your computer.

Google Docs, Sheets get iOS 9 split screen (finally)

From the Six Colors blog:

Today brought some great news. Updates to Google Docs and Google Sheets add split-view multitasking to those apps at last.

This is a big deal for iPad users. Now it’s possible to update a Google document or spreadsheet while also viewing Safari or using any other multitasking-capable app you can think of.

Yes! I am recently relying way more on Google Docs and Sheets to collaborate with my colleagues. I am also using my iPad increasingly more often as a work device. These two apps were previously the only two I used on a regular basis that could not be opened alongside another app on my giant iPad Pro's display. Now I can finally do something like, for example, plan a concert in Notes on one side of the screen while referencing my score inventory in Google Sheets on the other side.

Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood on NPR All Songs Considered

I am really enjoying listening to the most recent episode of All Songs Considered. Jonny Greenwood discusses the new Radiohead album, A Moon Shaped Pool. He talks about all sorts of interesting things like how they differ their approach to writing and recording each album, and how the band functions more like a group of co-arrangers rather than an ensemble of different instruments.

Click here to listen to the episode in Overcast.

All Songs +1: A Conversation With Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood :

It's not really about can I do my guitar part now, it's more ... what will serve this song best? How do we not mess up this really good song? Part of the problem is Thom will sit at the piano and play a song like 'Pyramid Song' and we're going to record it and how do we not make it worse, how do we make it better than him just playing it by himself, which is already usually quite great. We're kind of, we're arrangers really."

My iPad Homescreen - August 7th, 2016 Edition

There is nothing more fun for an app nerd than discussing their homescreen. The homescreen is the screen on a mobile device that contains the most essential apps for the conscious user. I am always changing this screen depending on the time of year, apps I am using frequently, and new apps I am trying out. Here is what my current homescreen looks like...

My current homescreen.

And a brief description of some noteworthy apps on it...

The Dock

Messages - With iMessage, my iPad is just another window into my text conversations. I use this app just as much on the iPad and Mac as I do on the phone.

Spark Mail - One of my favorite Mail app replacements. Spark has enough power features to merit its own blog post, but the feature I am finding quite useful right now is the ability to filter just the important notifications so I am not bothered by junk email throughout the day.

Notes - The Apple Notes app is increasingly becoming my go to for most of my note taking needs. I love using it for checklists, outlines, and sketching. The action extension (accessible from within any iOS app by pressing the square with the arrow pointing out of it) allows me to clip whatever I am looking at, no matter the app, into a new note or existing note.

OmniFocus - This app runs my life. I keep it on the dock for easy access to my tasks and projects.

Drafts - Most of what I type on the iPad starts here and then later gets filtered into the app that best suits its content. I am often sending drafts to Twitter, OmniFocus, Notes app, and my blog app.

Other Essentials

Dropbox - Pretty much all of my documents live here. This is where I browse, edit, and share them from my iPad.

Documents - Think of Documents as the missing Finder app on iPad. It allows you to work with files locally on the iPad but also from various cloud services like Dropbox and Google Drive. In fact, it allows you to see all of your content from all of your cloud drives all in the same window. Right now this is crucial for me because I am using a personal and professional Google Drive account simultaneously. Documents allows me to be logged into both of them at the same time, something not even my Mac can do.

Pages - Of all the basic "office" style applications I work with, Pages is perhaps the most essential. Pages is a beautiful and intuitive replacement for Microsoft Word. I love how it seamlessly syncs my documents across all devices through iCloud Drive.

Byword - Byword is a plain text editor. If I am typing a document of length that doesn't need to look pretty or include any multimedia, I usually type it here. Byword has a clutter free atmosphere that allows me to focus on just the text I am typing rather than buttons and tools.

forScore - My entire mobile score workflow is based on this app. I pull scores from my Dropbox account right into forScore where I can annotate them, perform from them, categorize them, and add all sorts of interesting metadata to them.

Blog - This is the app I use to post to my blog on my Squarespace website.

Notion - Still the best music notation software on iPad. I use it for small projects and defer to Sibelius on my Mac still for larger scale work. Notion allows you to scribble on a staff with the Apple Pencil and then it converts your hand writing into crystal clear notation. It's magical.

Recent Favorites:

Google Drive - I have been deviating a little bit from my entirely Dropbox based workflow recently, in part because some colleagues of mine prefer to use Google Drive for collaboration. I really like the Google Drive app. I just wish that the Google Docs and Sheets app took advantage of iPad Pro split screen multitasking.

Sheets - Of all the a Google Doc apps, Sheets is the one I use the most. There are a bunch of ways to use cloud drives to collaborate with others on spreadsheets but Google Sheets is the only one I trust to sync everyone's data reliably. I use this app very frequently to access docs related to scheduling and inventory.

GoodNotes - Although I am using Apple Notes for most things, I find that a few tasks require a little more power. GoodNotes is great at a couple of things. First of all, it has excellent Apple Pencil support for handwritten note taking and sketching. Next, I love how easy it is to combine my own notes along with other PDFs from my iPad all into the same notebooks. GoodNotes (and apps like Notability, which I was previously using until I started trying GN) does the best job allowing me to immediately scribble on top of PDFs. Many PDF annotation apps offer this feature but typically take a couple of taps to enter into annotation mode. GoodNotes feels more like a piece of paper. Also, while there are plenty of great dedicated score apps (including Notion from earlier in this post), I love that GN has a staff paper option. In fact, it is easy to intermingle a diverse range of paper styles all within the same notebook.

Slack - What is Slack? My favorite communication tool on the planet. Slack is an awesome collaboration tool for teams. I am not really sure this is the place to detail the range of its features, but I will share that the music team at my school has been using Slack for the past few months and it has been a real game changer. It is coming to replace both text messaging and email for us. The basic idea behind Slack is that a team can have multiple different "channels" within their team which are basically conversation threads. Any member of the team can be in any channel. For example, all of the people in our team who teach band or orchestra classes are part of an instrumental music channel where we have almost all of our digital communication about that subject. The choir guy doesn't have to see any of that conversation. There is a general channel for general communication and even a random channel so that my endless gifs do not annoy my coworkers by disrupting otherwise productive discussions. Slack takes the cruft and formality out of the picture, enabling simple text conversation while also empowering us to be way better organized about the way we collaborate on different projects. Slack also has tons of integrations with other services. For example, with the Google Drive integration, I can share Google Docs right from within a Slack channel and other users can comment on it or launch right into it.

1Password - My favorite app for managing passwords, software serial numbers, secure notes, and more. I never forget a password with this app. And Touch ID on my iPad allows me to log in anywhere by simply touching my thumb to the home button.

Scrivener - Scrivener is a non-linear writing tool. I used the Mac version to write my book. I am beginning to plan some other writing projects and am enjoying the ability to sync my projects from Mac to iPad and back again.

comiXology - I pretty much only have time to read comic books in the summer. If you are in to this sort of thing, Amazon's comiXology app is the place to buy and read your comics (actually, because Amazon likes to avoid paying Apple's 30 percent of every purchase, you will have to buy the comics from Amazon or comiXology's website). comiXology has this cool feature I like where it smartly detects the ends of the frames and allows you to scroll through each of them full screen. Right now, I am reading the Walking Dead series.

BusyCal - I am trying out this Calendar replacement right now. Usually, my calendar app of choice is Fantastical but BusyCal allows me to do some interesting things like, for example, associate contacts in my address book with events for better context.

Why hip-hop is interesting

Ethan Hein recently wrote a massive blog post diving into some stylistic analysis of hip-hop, including a theoretical analysis of Kanye West's song Famous.

I find myself relating to so much of what Ethan Hein values in hip-hop. Not to mention, he is totally leveraging the power of the Internet to provide countless links and references to very dense ideas that he only mentions in passing. This kind of comprehensive, media rich, exposition really leverages the diverse range and content of media on the web.

This is a must read. Don't let Kanye West's "offensiveness" stop you from checking it out.

Why hip-hop is interesting | The Ethan Hein Blog:

Hip-hop has been getting plenty of scholarly attention lately, but most of it has been coming from cultural studies. Which is fine! Hip-hop is culturally interesting. When humanities people do engage with hip-hop as an art form, they tend to focus entirely on the lyrics, treating them as a subgenre of African-American literature that just happens to be performed over beats. And again, that’s cool! Hip-hop lyrics have significant literary interest. (If you’re interested in the lyrical side, we recommend this video analyzing the rhyming techniques of several iconic emcees.) But what we want to discuss is why hip-hop is musically interesting, a subject which academics have given approximately zero attention to.

Much of what I find exciting (and difficult) about hip-hop can be found in Kanye West’s song “Famous,” from his latest album The Life Of Pablo. The song comes with a video, a ten minute art film that shows Kanye in bed sleeping after a group sexual encounter with his wife, his former lover, his wife’s former lover, his father-in-law turned mother-in-law, various of his friends and collaborators, Bill Cosby, George Bush, Taylor Swift, and Donald Trump. There’s a lot to say about this, but it’s beyond the scope of our presentation, and also, words fail me. I’ll just focus on the song itself.

Side note: I am also really impressed with those embedded Noteflight players that display the brief excerpts of notation. Go Noteflight!

Past student, Evan Chapman, gets interviewed for Modern Drummer magazine

Read the interview here: Evan Chapman of Square Peg Round Hole: Juniper Album, “Name Not One Man” Video World Premiere | Modern Drummer Magazine

Wow! Check out past student of mine, Evan Chapman, in this interview with Modern Drummer Magazine.

The interview celebrates Evan's band, Square Peg Round Hole, their new (and fantastic) album, Juniper, and the world premiere of their "Name Not One Man" music video.

Square Peg Round Hole combines the best of electronic, post rock, and contemporary percussion idioms. I can tell Evan is totally nerding out explaining some of the grooves on the record (which are just as inspired by the band's classical/contemporary percussion background as they are modern rock and electronic):

MD: In “A-frame” off of Juniper, there’s a groove around the three-minute mark with single hi-hat hits that first occur a 16th note after the backbeat, and then during the second half of the phrase they sound like they come before it. It almost creates this push-pull motion, or feels like the groove is swirling. Do you have any specific approach to writing patterns like this?

Evan: This kind of writing draws from my love for process music. I’ll admit that I’m a total nerd when it comes to math in music, and I’m fascinated with permutations and serialism. On a larger scale, the group will often throw in compositional processes like addition, diminution, and phasing. But on a smaller scale, I’ll occasionally throw permutations into my drum parts. The “A-Frame” groove that you’re referring to is a subtle example of that. A more obvious example is the ending of “Unraveling,” where the bell of my ride cymbal cycles between every fourth 16th, then every third, then every second, then every downbeat, and then back again through the cycle in reverse. Like I said, I’m a nerd.

The SPRH sound has the rich expanse of a modern rock ensemble, all coming from just three percussionists. Rock music can be straightforward and often improvised. Likewise, a lot of SPRH ideas don't strike the ear as very complex at first, but the sound is very intently composed.

MD: At certain points it feels like standard drum grooves are dropped in favor of creating more of a percussive approach. For instance, using floor toms almost as a melody instrument. Is there any concept behind this approach?

Evan: I’m generally drawn to drummers who think more like composers and percussionists. Glenn Kotche is a perfect example of this. He’s expanded his drumset to be more like a multi-percussion setup, which causes him to think about his parts differently. I think along those same lines, using different drums and cymbals as different parts of the melody. I use a non-traditional setup with SPRH, which also inspires me to come up with more unique parts.

Our floor toms are a very large part of our sound and the drum patterns that develop between Sean [M. Gill] and me. Sean plays a floor tom in his setup as well, and we’re often coming up with patterns that work together to create something that no single player could achieve. During the section beginning at 6:07 in “Unraveling,” the two of us build a hocketing drum part in an additive way. With every repetition, Sean builds his part note-by-note from the back to the front, and I build mine from the front to the back. The result is a section that gradually evolves from seemingly chaos to a powerful groove.

Not to mention, it is very gracious for Evan to list me as an influence during his musical education, of which I am honored to have had any part in.

After John Gleason retired from teaching drums, I went on to study with several other wonderful private instructors—Grant Menefee, Scott Tiemann, and Robert Burns—who each taught me a unique set of skills including orchestral, Brazilian, and Afro-Cuban percussion, four-mallet marimba, chart reading, sight reading, and more. All of this prepared me for a degree in music.

Check out Square Peg Round Hole. Congratulations Evan!

Apple improves iCloud Music Library matching, ditches copy-protected matched files for Apple Music users

Apple improves iCloud Music Library matching, ditches copy-protected matched files for Apple Music users:

When Apple Music was released just over a year ago, Apple also debuted iCloud Music Library, a way of storing your iTunes library in the cloud. There were two ways to seed the cloud, either with iTunes Match or Apple Music. If you were an iTunes Match subscriber, matching your songs in your local library to your cloud library was done one way, and if you were just an Apple Music subscriber, matching was done differently.

This created some confusion about the way tracks were matched and stored in iCloud Music Library. Now, Apple is changing this, and will use the same matching method for both services. The company said in a briefing that Apple Music now uses acoustic fingerprinting and provides matched files without digital rights management (DRM), or copy protection, just like iTunes Match.

It seriously blows my mind that this isn't the way it worked from the start. Even after reading this article, I am still unsure if it is safe to cancel my iTunes Match subscription or not.

Subscribing to Apple Music is a huge risk on my part. For the record, I keep two local back ups and one cloud back up of music files in addition to my iTunes Match/Apple Music subscriptions. I of all people want Apple Music to succeed but things like this make me wonder why Apple isn't doing more to secure their footing as a musically relevant tech company.

For the times that Apple Music works as I want it to, it is still worth the experiment. More often than not, it syncs my iTunes Library across all of my Macs and iOS devices. But there are still frequent syncing bugs, in particular, the accuracy of metadata like album art and song titles. And don't get me started on how my MacBook frequently logs me out of my account. At the end of the day though, Apple Music shows potential to be much more than other streaming services..

If you are looking for a music subscription service like Spotify or Google Music, I think Apple Music is getting close enough to complete. But if you are more like me, and you keep a vast library of rare and live albums, personally created and uploaded mp3s, and rely on iTunes to get your job done, it might not be worth the headache.