App of the Week: Neural Mix Pro

I have been testing out a Mac App called Neural Mix Pro, made by the people who make the popular DJay App for macOS and iOS.

It promises to take songs in your music library and hard drive and independently isolate vocals, drums, and other accompaniment so that they can be separated and mixed independently.

It works. I haven't played with it enough to know the breadth of its capability, but I tested the following songs, and they worked enough that I think I would use this tool for future music projects and teaching resources.

• Blues for Time: a fusion song in a drum set method book I assign often. I already had a drum-less version of the track, but the one I could make in Neural Mix Pro was satisfactory. There are some artifacts when you filter out instruments, but that was to be expected. No vocals on this track, but drums and other accompaniment separated correctly.
• Material Girl, Madonna: The vocals and electronic drums are so heavy in this track that isolating just the accompaniment instruments resulted in the correct instruments but not with an EQ that I would use for anything professionally. The vocals and drums sounded ok when separated.
• Jesus Walks, Kanye West: very satisfactory separation of drums, accompaniment, vocals. The backup vocals in the intro are tied to the vocal track, however. No way to separate that. With Neural Mix, you can export just one of the three tracks and apply a target key or tempo to change to it. I exported this tune to an even 80 bpm (it was around 78.x bpm, to begin with) into Logic Pro and has some fun toying around with adding my own improvisations using software instruments. I can see how this could be a useful tool for DJs, music producers, and music educators alike.

Here is a video of my quick demo. I made this on a computer with limited access to my music library and no real goal in mind other than to play around. Let me know if there is something you think I should test in the app.

I can see this app being useful in the music classroom for a few reasons. In my general music class, where we use Soundtrap to produce music, I could giving students a vocal track for a pop song and having them remix it. The results in Neural Mix are, by far, good enough for student use, and I imagine my students having a blast with this.

I could also use this in private lessons by taking songs my students drum along to and making "Minus One" recordings out of them that don't any longer have the drums. Alternatively, I could make them a drum-only version of a song to study the details more closely.

This would be more useful you could separate other instruments than just drums. Taking an instrumentalist out of a jazz record to create a track to improvise over is one of a handful of possibilities that immediately popped into my head. Perhaps these features are in store for a future update. Or maybe this app will remain geared towards pop music, DJs, and music producers. Either way, I can see myself using it on my never-ending quest to make fun play-along tracks for the band to play along to.

Apple Silicon, Macs in Education, and App-Centric Learning

Apple Silicon Macs are likely going to be announced at their upcoming event this Tuesday, November 10th.

Bradley Chambers is incredibly knowledgeable about Apple's relationship with education and he makes some great points in the post below about how this transition could influence the Mac in education.

Making the Grade: What will Apple Silicon mean for Apple's education strategy? - 9to5Mac:

I believe that Apple will have untold flexibility in what kind of laptops they can produce for schools now. Is it possible to build an 11″ MacBook based on Apple Silicon that is $799 when purchased in bulk but still runs extremely fast? I believe so. It might not be in the first year or two of Apple Silicon’s lifespan that we see it, but in a few years, it’s certainly possible that Apple will have reduced the cost on the A14 to put it in a K–12 focused laptop in the future.

I could be way off base on my predictions. Still, I believe that Apple Silicon will unlock a lot of potential in K–12 to produce lower-cost laptops that will run circles around much higher priced laptops running Intel chips. I’d love to see an 11″ Apple Silicon laptop aimed directly at students that could be used for many years.

I really do hope that Apple tries to be creative with the Mac in education again. Still, I fear that anything they do is too little, too late. Apple has has not been aggressive in education. They tend to make huge leaps in certain areas of their business and then let them settle for a long time, sometimes years. This approach works for developing consumer software like note-taking apps, but it is not aggressive enough to compete with Chromebooks and cloud-based education software. I think back to Apple’s education event a few years back where they positioned the iPad as their future in schools and released a bunch of APIs that iOS app developers could use to link into their Classroom app. Years later, what has come of any of that? If you are using iPads in education, and you use Apple Classroom in combination with third party apps, I would love to hear from you!

Chromebooks and web apps have taken off. And a lot of these web apps can talk to each other. For example, third parties like Flipgrid and Noteflight can integrate with LMS software like Blackboard and Canvas. But these connections are often full of frustrating bugs. On top of this, the quality of a lot of this software in ed tech is already so poor. I wouldn't exactly call it a race to the bottom, because most developers are doing their best with the resources they have, but I like to dream about an alternate reality where Apple's vision for an "app-centric" model were the norm instead of the "web-centric" model we have now.

Of course, web software is cheaper and cross-platform. So it makes sense that it has caught on for being most equitable. But in a world where Apple had kept their prices more competitive, maybe school districts would have been more willing to buy students 1:1 Apple products, especially when schools jumped online in March.

New book out–> Pass the Baton: Empowering All Music Students

Past Music Ed Tech Talk guest, Theresa Hoover, has a new book out with Kathryn Finch.

Pass the Baton: Empowering All Music Students: Finch, Kathryn, Hoover, Theresa: 9781951600549: Amazon.com: Books

All too often the music classroom stifles students with one-size-fits-all curricula and repertoire. In Pass the Baton, authors Kathryn Finch and Theresa Hoover turn that paradigm on its head, offering a vision of music education that empowers students as critical thinkers who exercise voice and choice to question, discover, connect, and play like never before—in and out of the classroom.

Pass the Baton offers readers a comprehensive guide to crafting engaging music lessons that transform students from passive consumers to vibrant creatives. Whether you’re looking to rethink general music or overhaul your ensemble groups, Pass the Baton is chock-full of generative, actionable, and impactful tools. Finch and Hoover have drawn on deep research and years of experience in the music room to provide a guide for all music educators to create a learner-centered environment and give students the opportunity to truly own the creative process.

Giving students leadership in the classroom is the one sure way to make sure they understand and engage with your instruction. Though this book has been in development for a long time, I think it’s worth noting also that these strategies have huge relevance in an online or hybrid learning environment, just as they do in person. Click the link above to check the book out on Amazon and purchase it.

You can listen to Theresa discuss the book with me on the podcast episode she was on here. That episode was great fun to record and we covered a ton of topics including student engagement, tech tools, productivity tips, and virtual teaching strategies. 

Google Meet rolling out custom backgrounds

Google Meet rolling out custom background images for web - 9to5Google:

Google Meet continues its onslaught of pre-announced features today with the launch of custom backgrounds during video calls. This customization is a staple of modern conferencing apps, and one that helps convey “more of your personality.”

Another Google Meet feature playing catchup with Zoom. This has started rolling out in my school district but I don’t have the option in my account yet.

From what I have seen other students do, it appears to work as expected, maybe slightly less consistent at detecting the edges of a person than Zoom is.

Many of Google Meet’s “catchup” features of the past few months have been buggy, though I think I prefer them being this aggressive with updates than to drag their feet.

It will be interesting to see what Google can do with Meet that is actually unique to their companies strengths. The pandemic caught them by surprise and they have been rushing to keep up with the success of Zoom.

Google has always had too many communication apps, and has never seemed to know what to do with them (Google Hangouts, Duo, Allo, and a bunch of others that have been killed off). Google has a lot of potential with Meet and seems to be focusing on it with more intent since the pandemic forced many to work line.

Google has an education platform to rest on which Zoom doesn’t have. It would be interesting to see them make a move that better integrated Meet with Google Classroom and Docs. Hopefully, we will see them continue to focus on rapid development in the coming months, even after they have ”caught up” with many of Zoom’s popular features.

App of the Week: Reeder 5

The Reeder widget can serve up articles from blogs I subscribe to or that I have set aside to read later (or both using a stack of widgets).

On episode 18 of Music Ed Tech Talk, Reeder 5 was my App of the Week.

It's a really good app and I thought it was worth linking to the review from MacStories if you want to learn more.

Reeder 5 Review: Read Later Tagging, iCloud Sync, and Design Refinements - MacStories:

Last year we named RSS client Reeder 4 the Best App Update as part of the MacStories Selects awards for a good reason. Reeder has been one of the best-designed RSS apps available for a very long time. With the release of version 4, developer Silvio Rizzi rebuilt the app on a modern foundation from the ground up. Roughly one year later, version 5 is out as a brand new app that takes what Rizzi began last year and extends it further with a host of excellent new features and design refinements.

I don't trust social media to show me what I want. If I like a blog, a Twitter account, or an email newsletter, I subscribe to it through Feedbin, and then read my Feedbin articles through Reeder 5. I also log into my Instapaper account through Reeder 5 and clip articles I want to read later to it with a speedy swipe-left.

On page two of my home screen, I have this medium sized widget at the bottom that rotates between different news sources: Apple News, Apollo, Feedbin, and Instapaper, the later of the two using the Reeder 5 widget. It's a great way to stay on top of the news that's important to me.

METT Episode #19 - Productivity Boot Camp (Part 2): Email and Calendars, with Dr. Frank Buck

Thanks to my sponsor this month, Flat for Education.

Dr. Frank Buck returns to the show for Part 2 of the Productivity Boot Camp mini-series to talk all about managing calendars, handling email, time tracking, and automation!

Dr. Frank Buck is a productivity master with a background in band directing and administration. I share my knowledge of Apple products and native third-party apps, and he shares his experience with web-based, cross-platform apps.

Show Notes:

• Google Calendar
• Fantastical
• If This Than That
• Get IFTTT Pro on sale until October 31!
• Zapier
• Toggl
• Timery
• Evernote
• If This Then That: My Dozen Most Powerful Applets | Frankbuck.org
• How to Use Evernote to Track Your Time | Frankbuck.org
• Screen Snips with 1 Key: My New Favorite Shortcut | Frankbuck.org
• Spark Email App
• Outlook Email App
• Save to Google Drive Extension
• OmniFocus
• DEVONthink
• SaneBox
• Auto Text Expander for Google Chrome
• TextEpander
• Tapes - Screen recorder for Mac. Share screencasts fast.
• Feedly
• Feedbin
• Apollo: Reddit Client for iOS
• 52 Years Ago, Thelonious Monk Played a High School. Now Everyone Can Hear It. | NTY

App of the Week:
Robby - Reeder 5
Frank Buck - Snipboard.io

Album of the Week:
Robby - Palo Alto | Thelonious Monk
Frank Buck - Christmas Portrait | The Carpenters

Where to Find Us:
Robby - Twitter | Blog | Book
Frank Buck - Twitter | Website

Please don't forget to rate the show and share it with others!

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Using Drafts and TextExpander to Organize Lesson Notes

I am moving more of my text notes to Drafts these days. You can read about how I use Drafts here. Drafts is a note-taking app where most of my text typing starts. When I am ready to act upon my text, the actions on the right side of the screen allow me to send it off to messages, emails, tasks, notes, social media, and more.

Generally, I use Drafts as a text-inbox, where I eventually process all of my text ideas and send them to other apps that are better suited for them. But lately, I wonder why I need to take the extra step of sending a draft to another app when Drafts is perfectly suited for organizing and searching text.

Let's take Lesson Notes, for example. When I teach a sectional, large ensemble, or private lesson, I like to take notes on what we played and what I assigned. Usually, I would type these in Drafts and then send the finished text to Apple Notes. But lately, I am just keeping it in Drafts and archiving it so that it doesn't clutter up the inbox area. Everything is in plaintext so searching my entire 7,000 draft library is way faster than searching Apple Notes. Plus, it reduces the amount of time I ever even need to open Apple Notes by 90 percent.

I add the tag "sectionals" to a draft where I have taken sectional notes, and I have a custom workspace that allows me to see just the drafts with that tag.

Additionally, tagging them "badge" makes it so that the draft doesn't contribute to the number on the red badge of the Drafts icon. I use the badge only to inform me of drafts that need to be processed to another app.

I write most of my drafts in Markdown, which means I use "#" symbols to note levels of the heading, "**" to indicate things I want bold, etc... If you want to read more about how I use Markdown, read this post. Drafts and common web editing tools like WordPress (and even Canvas) can turn this Markdown into HTML. I only use Markdown for my sectional notes to show bullet-pointed lists and first/second-level headings. Drafts does some light formatting to help me better see this information by, for example, highlighting the headings green.

It gets tedious to retype this template for every class, so I have TextExpander snippets to do it for me. Read about how I am using TextExpander here.

In the case of the snippet below, I type "sectionalnotes" into the body of the draft and then TextExpander prompts me for the ensemble and sectional name and then automatically fills in that data, with my fill-ins and the current date.

Using an action called Current UUID, I can copy a link to a draft to my clipboard and paste it in to the calendar event for whatever class, lesson, or sectional it is related to. That way, I can easily refer to it by date, using the visually friendly interface of a calendar app.

'Music Quiz' iPod Game Brought Back to Life Through Siri Shortcuts

This is from a while ago but I think many will appreciate it…

Apple revives classic ‘Music Quiz’ iPod game through the Shortcuts app on iOS 14 - 9to5Mac:

On the iPod, Music Quiz plays a number of songs in shuffle mode and it provides five different options for you to choose which song is playing. The shortcut version of this mini game on iOS 14 is quite similar, as it also plays random songs with five different answer options.

Music Quiz on iOS 14 is part of the “Starter Shortcuts” folder, which offers four different shortcuts that demonstrate what users can do with the app. In order to find and play Music Quiz on your iPhone or iPad running iOS 14 or iPadOS 14, just follow the steps below:

If you have not tried Siri Shortcuts on your phone yet, this is a fun way to test them out. It’s baked right in to your phone if you are running iOS 14.

This shortcut makes it really easy to dissect how one of these is built and play around with the logic a bit to better understand how you might build your own automations using similar building blocks.

Sponsor Music Ed Talk Talk!

Do you have a product, app, or service that you would like to promote?

I am now offering sponsorships for the blog and podcast! A sponsorship includes…

• An ad pinned to the sidebar of this blog (my thanks to this month’s sponsor, Flat for Education!)

• A blog post about your product in my feed. You can provide the copy. If you wish, I can test your product and add some of my own experiences to the post.

• An ad read on one episode of my podcast. Again, you provide the copy, but it is read conversationally in the middle of my show, not like a commercial. I speak to my own experiences if I have them.

I am open to all kinds of sponsorships. The audience of the blog and podcast are musicians and educators, often active music teachers, who are generally tech-savvy. Many of them use multiple computing devices, aren’t afraid to try new tech, and are looking for practical ways to engage their students musically.

Naturally, software that enhances the creative and productive lives of musicians and teachers is a good fit but I am open to sponsorships of a much wider variety than just that. Music stores, colleges, fundraisers, books, you name it!

If you want to be a sponsor, or if you want more details, choose Contact in the navigation bar of this site and leave me a message!

And if you don’t have a reason to sponsor the site in this way, but you want to support my continued hosting costs and motivation to keep producing content, check out my Buy Me a Coffee page. I appreciate any and all support!

Take Advantage of IFTTT Discounted Price Until October 31

In an upcoming episode of my podcast, Frank Buck and I talk a bit about automation. In that episode we reference a great service called If This Than That. I have been using it for years and though the service is free, they recently announced a Pro Version with a “choose your own price” subscription model.

You can choose a price as low as $1.99 a month until October 31. Since the podcast episode isn’t dropping until later in the week, I thought I would get this news out there now.

This is an extremely useful service that has been a part of my productivity workflow for years. IFTTT allows you to string together different apps and services to create automations, or, “Applets.” Some examples might include:

• If I save a YouTube video to watch later, add a task to remind me to watch it

• If I like a Tweet, save the attached article to a read it later list

• If I am tagged in an Instagram photo, save it to my Dropbox

• If I do an item on my to do list, log it in a row of a Google Sheet

• If I pin something on Pinterest, share it to Facebook

The possibilities are limitless. The pro version adds a ton of features, for example:

• Multi-step Applets

• Queries and conditional logic

• Multiple actions

• Faster Applet execution

  ... and beyond.

IFTTT is a great tool and I strongly recommend you check our the new pro features before the end of this month!