Great iOS 11 concept video

Check out this expertly executed concept video of features that Federico Viticci hopes will come to the iPad in iOS 11. 

I use my iPad for getting work done more and more everyday. There are still a lot of hurdles in the software for getting work done. I think Federico has done a great job illustrating how some of these problems could be solved in an elegant way that doesn't confuse the intuitive nature of iOS. 

I will loose my mind if Apple announces a file management feature anything like the Finder demoed in this video. Apple's developer conference kicks off with a keynote at 1 pm on June 5 where they are expected to announce next years iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS feature updates. Announcements of some hardware products, including a Siri powered speaker to rival the Amazon Echo, are also rumored to appear. 

My WWDC 2017 Wish List

Apple's World Wide Developer Conference kicks off with a keynote on June 5th. This keynote is where Apple announces most of the major software features to expect on their devices the following fall. I figured it would be fun to round up all of the software features I want to see most on each of their platforms. I posed this list to reddit and asked the r/apple community what they wanted to see implemented. Click here to view the thread.

Here is the list I proposed:

macOS

• News app to mirror the one on iOS
• improvements to pro apps (Final Cut Pro X and Logic Pro X) and additions to the Photos app
• splitting iTunes up into separate apps like what is on iOS: separate app for Music, TV, Podcasts, and iTunes Store

iOS

• default apps (won't happen)
• serious overhaul of iPad productivity (better file system, better home screen, drag and drop, better multitasking, more control over audio ins and outs)

tvOS

• PiP
• Ability to watch TV content from two apps at once
• ability to command with Siri without the Remote app (for example, I want to say to my phone, “hey Siri watch Game of Thrones,” and have it turn on the TV, launch the HBO app and start the most recent episode)
• ability to sync all Apple TVs in the house so that they show the same video at once (for parties...also, this won't happen)

watchOS

• smart contexts: ability to change Watch face, complications, and notifications based on sensitivity to time and location
• better audio controls (easier to access Now Playing screen, complications to play and pause audio, ability to scroll the crown for volume and use hardware buttons for control whenever audio has recently been playing)

General

• Siri improvements (more reliable, faster, more open to third party apps, better integration with tvOS, local dictation and basic commands
• AirPods with always listening Siri
• improvements to iCloud Drive (shared folders, files, and URLs)

Here are some of my favorite features that reddit users replied with:

• Multiple iOS user logins
• Hey Siri on Mac
• custom watch faces
• open CarPlay up to more developers (pasrticular third party maps apps and messenging apps)
• iOS dark mode
• Workflow integration
• Open up NFC to third party apps
• Apple Pay your friends and family over iMessage
• Apple Music continuity

Thelonius Monk's Advice

Thelonius Monk's Advice:

The following fantastic list of advice comes courtesy of legendary jazz pianist Thelonious Monk, a musical genius who died exactly 30 years ago, on February 17th of 1982. The list was transcribed by saxophonist Steve Lacy in 1960.

Amongst my favorites on the list:

• Stop playing all those weird notes, play the melody!
• Don’t play everything (or all the time); let some things go by. Some music just imagined. What you don’t play can be more important than what you do.
• A note can be as small as a pin or as big as the world, it depends on your imagination.

SoundSource - The Sound Control That Should Be Built into macOS

YES! I have been waiting for something like this for years. Leave it to Rogue Amoeba to create another Mac utility that fulfills a task that should come standard on the macOS.

SoundSource lives in the menu bar of your Mac and gives you fine control over the inputs and outputs of your audio. Given that I am an audio professional, I am always plugging my computer in and out of various different speakers, microphones, and audio interfaces. SoundSource offers me a convenient menu for managing these, one click away at all times.

Check it out here.

MMEA 2017 Session Notes

Here are the session notes for the presentation, Digital Organization Tips for Music Teachers:  MMEA 2017 - Robby Burns Session Notes

My most used app in the music classroom, Tonal Energy, gets a huge update!

My no. 1 most used music app in the classroom[^1], Tonal Energy, gets a huge update today.

The app brings support for iOS 10 (finally), higher screen resolution on plus sized iPhones (finally!), and better matches the design language Apple introduced with iOS 7 (FINALLY!).

And to top it off, it has an Apple Watch app. I have yet to use an Apple Watch app I love for a metronome[^2] so I will have to report back if this one is any good.

What I have explained above are primarily cosmetic. This upgrade is also jammed full of new features. It will take me some time to explore them all, but in the meantime, see the images below for some of the highlights, mentioned on the app's App Store page.

Expect a blog post in the coming days with more thoughts on the overall experience of using this app.

TonalEnergy Chromatic Tuner and Metronome by Sonosaurus LLC

Download link: https://appsto.re/us/kYOQD.i

[^1]: Ok, it may be tied with forScore.

[^2]: tacet is an alright metronome app but is the only one that comes close to being useful in my opinion.

TMEA 2017

I am thrilled to be at TMEA again this year! I am presenting my session, Digital Time Management for the Music Teacher, as part of the TI:ME Pre-Conference on February 8, 2017 at 4pm in room 210.

My book, Digital Organization Tips for Music Teachers, will be on sale at the Oxford University Press booth, where I will be doing a book signing on Thursday afternoon. I hope to see you there!

If you attended my session, here are the session notes: https://www.evernote.com/l/AAL5B_BZQg1AWJRx91KBz961XANaMJlA7U8

OMEA 2017 Presentations and Session Notes

I am thrilled to be back at OMEA this year. The three sessions I will present this weekend contain some cross-over software and services. Click the link below to see live session notes, complete with an overview of concepts to help you get digitally organized and download links to all of the apps mentioned in each of my sessions.

The Sessions:

Working with Digital Scores, February 3, 2017, 1 pm (Room 23)
Digital Time Management for the Music Teacher, February 3, 2017, 5 pm (Room 23)
Digital Organization Tips for Music Teachers, February 4, 2017, 10:45 am (Room 23)

The Notes:

https://www.evernote.com/l/AAKLhnbxxzNB4YmdbJXhLI64i_HYAgJ6Y_8

Conference season!

It is a pretty exciting time of year for me. I am presenting at the Ohio Music Educators Association conference next week and at the Texas and Maryland MEA conferences the following week.

At each conference I am promoting my new book, Digital Organization Tips for Music Teachers. I am also introducing two new sessions into my repertoire: Digital Time Management for Music Teachers and Working with Digital Scores.

My book will be available for sale at TMEA and most likely at OMEA. I look forward to seeing you if you are at either of these conferences!

Syncing a File Between Logic and GarageBand (iOS) Through iCloud - First Test

I have taken it upon myself to test out the latest updates to GarageBand on iOS and Logic on Mac. Specifically, I have been pushing this new feature where you can prepare a Logic file you have started on the Mac for use on the GarageBand app on iOS.

This feature is compelling to me because a lot of my audio editing these days requires the power tools of Logic, but also the ease of simply booting up a project and making lots of light edits. For example, when I podcast, I usually only manage 2-6 tracks, not 30+. I need Logic for the control over my plugins, quick workflows, etc… but I also need a light and efficient way to make small edits on the go. I am constantly moving around between a busy schedule of public school, private lessons, concerts, gigs, and other miscellaneous commitments. It is nearly impossible to get any editing done on a Mac alone. The iPad is the perfect platform for this. Press the wake button, launch the app, and make a couple of quick cuts. There has not been a great way to work with Logic projects on the iPad, at least until this recent feature announcement.

Testing the First Project

Here is how I ran my first test of this feature. I created a Logic file on my Mac and added some software instrument tracks and audio tracks. I tried two audio tracks and two software instrument tracks for the first test. I wanted to keep it simple for the OS to handle and simple for me to keep track of how precisely it was syncing my edits (or not). 

After recording some MIDI notes and audio into these four tracks, I went to the File Menu and selected “Share->Project to Garage and for iOS.” This act creates a GarageBand version of the file in the “GarageBand iOS” folder which is stored within the iCloud Drive folder.

File Management is Messy as Usual

Ok, so this is where things get weird. It saddens me that Apple’s iCloud Drive model continues to overcomplicate the file syncing process. In my book, Digital Organization Tips for Music Teachers, I ponder why iCloud Drive does so little to compete with file services such as Dropbox, which has been simpler, more intuitive, and more reliable since the start. The same issue I describe in my book is at play in this Logic->GarageBand workflow. 

It is still weird to me that iCloud Drive has container folders within itself that are app specific. It seems to me that this is an unwelcome abstraction for users who are accustomed to putting files in whatever folder they want. You can do this in iCloud Drive, by the way, but then the counterpart apps on iOS do not practice the syncing the same way. For example, if you sync a Keynote file from a Mac to an iPad by placing it in the “Keynote” folder, you can instantly see it when you boot up Keynote on the iPad. However, if you save it somewhere else in the iCloud Drive folder, it will not appear in the file viewer on iPad. You have to manually go looking for it by clicking the “new” button and then selecting it from within iCloud Drive. I wrote more precisely and clearly on this topic a few years back.

Things get murkier when you consider that iCloud Drive has two GarageBand folders. One for iOS and one for macOS. I get why they did this. Projects made on an iPad and shared with an iPhone are automatically saved to the iOS folder which makes that process less convoluted. And the same is true of two Macs working on the same project that was started on macOS. Mac projects have to do some prep work to get files ready for iOS so it is important to make the distinction. But since macOS is capable of this prep work, why can’t it happen automatically when the Mac version of a file is closed? And why, if iCloud is capable of syncing complex GarageBand projects, does the Mac version still try to save projects to a local folder called “GarageBand” that is stored within the “Music” folder by default? 

iCloud Drive still sports these strange, app specific, folders, including two segregated folders for GarageBand projects. This does not even include the local GarageBand folder that is stored within the Music folder on the computer's hard drive.

This process only gets more complicated with Logic thrown into the mix. Here is why…

Back to the Story

Ok, so I prepped my Logic file with four tracks to be worked on from an iPad and it saved it as a GarageBand project and placed it into the “iOS GarageBand” folder within my iCloud Drive. Now I go to my iPad and boot up GarageBand. Hooray! The file is already waiting for me in the file browser when I launch the app. I tap on it, and it opens, reliably! Except my two audio files have been compressed into one track. I can understand this because audio tracks take up far less processing power when they are collapsed. But what if the audio part is what I wanted to edit on my iPad? Shouldn't this be an option when I prepare the file for GarageBand? The iPad version can definetely handle more than one audio track at a time.

Next, I fool around with this project on iPad for a bit, adding audio effects to the vocal track I recorded. In this case, I am adding the effect that makes the voice sound like a monster and the audio track is just me saying “YAAAAAAAAASSSSS” over a funk beat. So my wife is now rolling her eyes from the couch. 

This is the only edit I make, because again, I am trying to keep this simple. I go back to my Mac and find the “GarageBand iOS” folder. Certainly, I can open this file right back up in Logic, right? Wrong. I double click the file and it opens in GarageBand. Fair enough, but wait, now GarageBand wants me to save the file to another location because it has to reformat it for the Mac. So I have to create a duplicate copy elsewhere? Doesn’t that sort of defeat the point of this new feature? Ok, fine. I click “Save As…” Where does GarageBand want to save the new version? The “GarageBand” folder within my “Music” folder. Seriously? Not even the “macOS GarageBand” folder in my iCloud Drive? Ok, I get it. Most users have only 5GB of iCloud space. Apple is making the right decision here. So now I have two versions and have already interacted with four different folders just to manage this one file. 

1. The Logic file was originally stored in the “Logic” folder from within my “Music” folder.

2. The “macOS GarageBand” that I saved the GarageBand version of that Logic file to.

3. The “iOS GarageBand” folder that I had to send the iOS version of the file to.

4. The local “GarageBand” folder that I am now being prompted to save my GarageBand for Mac file within.

“Sigh.” Am I done yet? Nope, because I have to open the local copy and prepare it to go back to Logic, which then offers me to save a third copy of the file. Where? In my local “Logic” folder, also located in the “Music” folder… Are you keeping up? My original Logic file was created in that folder, so now I have four copies.

I am not really sure what I expected. If GarageBand and Logic can do all of this heavy lifting, it seems some of the file management stuff could be automated. My dream scenario would have been that I could save the Logic file right to the iCloud Drive from the Mac, open it from the same location on iOS (using GarageBand) and then just seamlessly go back and fourth between the two, but who am I kidding. I guess we just aren’t there technologically. 

Conclusion

It seems like this feature is just laying the ground work for a future where either Logic exists on the iPad and can sync projects over iCloud (my iPad Pro is certainly powerful enough for it). Or for a feature much like I just described above, where the iOS never gets Logic but the two become closer and closer in feature parity until it doesn’t matter.

That second scenario is what happened with a lovely app Apple used to make called Aperture. Aperture was to iPhoto what Logic is to GarageBand. iPhoto and Aperture became so compatible that at one point, you could even direct both apps to edit the same photo library. Want to know what happened to Aperture? Apple discontinued it a few years back. Now we have the Photos app to replace both iPhoto and Aperture. And while I miss some of my pro photo editing tools from Aperture, photos are an area where I can get by with most of the features that are still left over in the Photos app. But Logic is NOT an application that I could get by with if it were ever dissolved into GarageBand. So lets hope Apple is not following down that same path…