You may have caught this headline last week:
The MP3 Is Officially Dead According To Its Creators
It is worth a read, but make sure you read Marco Arment’s followup:
“MP3 is dead” missed the real, much better story
In summary:
MP3 is supported by everything, everywhere, and is now patent-free. There has never been another audio format as widely supported as MP3, it’s good enough for almost anything, and now, over twenty years since it took the world by storm, it’s finally free.
A timely followup to MacStories’ iOS 11 Wish List Video…
One of my favorite productivity app developers, Readdle, has added drag and drop support to all of their iOS apps. This means that you can actually drag an email attachment from Spark Mail on one half of your iPad’s screen onto the Documents app on the other half of your screen and drop it in a folder. It works the other way too, allowing you to drag files from Documents into mail messages in Spark as email attachments.
For those of you who don’t know, Documents is a fantastic app and pretty much serves the role that a Finder app would if Apple ever chose to release one on iPad. Readdle’s apps are featured prominently throughout my book. PDF Expert, Documents, and Scanner Pro are especially useful in my daily teaching workflow.
Readdle has a great blog post demoing this feature and explaining how they were able to pull it off. It really is black magic! Read the post here.
Watch the video below.
Another topic I intended to blog about months ago and have been sitting on throughout the spring.
The Mac Pro Lives!!!
John Gruber wrote a great post at Daring Fireball recently outlining Apple’s plans for the future of their desktop computers.
Apple is currently hard at work on a “completely rethought” Mac Pro, with a modular design that can accommodate high-end CPUs and big honking hot-running GPUs, and which should make it easier for Apple to update with new components on a regular basis. They’re also working on Apple-branded pro displays to go with them.
This is fantastic news. No matter how late Apple is releasing this machine, or how late they are in realizing that they need to release this machine, it is good for everyone that they are releasing it. I own the 2008 Mac Pro. I love it, but I don't think I will buy another desktop Mac in the near future just because my needs have changed so much since 2008. But Apple making a modular pro level machine gives me hope for the platform. It means that creative professionals will be able to rely on Macs as their primary workstations for years to come. It also means that Apple is committed to macOS, an operating system that I have a lot of affection for and rely on to perform high level tasks and operate professional music software. This really is good news for anybody who loves the Mac, whether you need something like a Mac Pro or if the MacBook Air is enough for you.
This, in combination with Apple's recent acquisition of Workflow, lead me to believe that Apple really cares about putting powerful tools in the hands of their users, both traditional professionals who use Mac Pros, and edge case iOS power users.
I am still playing spring catch-up. A lot has happened in tech over the winter and early spring, a lot of it I wanted to write about but was lost in them sea of band concerts, assessments, conferences, and the like.
This one was very exciting for me…
Earlier this year, Apple acquired iOS productivity app Workflow (Download Link). You can read the general details of that acquisition here.
MacStories has a great write up of what this could mean for both Workflow and Apple here.
Workflow is one of the only reasons I can use an iPad to get work done. It is a standout app and anyone reading this should immediately stop and go download it from the App Store now that it is free. Workflow is at the core of a number of tasks I do on my iPad that are essential to teaching band on a daily basis. I wrote about it in my book, Digital Organization Tips for Music Teachers. Actually, one of the workflows I am most proud of including in the book is made in Workflow: by tapping a single button, a clean copy of a student seating chart is copied and exported into the Notability app where I can annotate it on half of the screen while I read my scores in forScoe on the other half of the screen. These annotated seating charts are later archived by date and used to help me remember information about my students and generate weekly rehearsal participation grades.
It's hard to say what this Apple acquisition could mean. I think the best case scenario is that the Workflow will get deeper access to the features of iOS, allowing even more powerful automations, perhaps even being rebranded "Automator" like the macOS app that functions similarly. Time will tell. In the meantime, go download Workflow!
This list is pretty esoteric but I love it. I don't think the average pop listener has Flying Lotus on rotation, nor would Beat Furrer's Spur be a piece I would use to introduce contemporary classical idioms to the uninitiated. But maybe most people who listen to some of the "pop" on this list are acquainted with some of the more standard classical rep, so perhaps the list is spot on after all. My ponderings aside, everything in here is really exceptional.
9 Gateway Pieces to Contemporary Music for Pop Lovers | heather roche:
He’s helped me to create a list of nine comparisons between contemporary classical music and pop, intended for curious pop music listeners, in which each counterpart piece has some artistic commonality with the other. While this blog normally hosts entries intended for the initiated contemporary classical music listener (and, for the most part, the composer), this post has the adventurous pop music listener in mind, the suggestions aiming to be portals to previously unencountered music.
I’ve tried to pick a mix of work: young people who are active and changing the new music landscape, an older generation at the height of their power, two who would be with us working still had they not died tragically young, and plenty of brilliant women. And I also provided a “What’s next” for each suggestion: I’m mostly freestyling here in my associations, but I hope they’re of interest. There are a lot of different avenues that contemporary classical music has gone down, so if one sub-genre doesn’t appeal to you, all is not lost. You might notice a lack of minimalist composers here: minimalism (Reich, Glass, Nyman, etc.) is fairly omnipresent these days; I wanted to expose some of the other sub-genres available to curious listeners.
Adventurous indeed.
As an advocate for both high quality speakers and home automation, the relationship between the Amazon Echo and the Sonos home stereo is exciting to me. Ever since the announcement of their future integration, I have wondered: how specifically will I be able to command my Sonos speakers? Will the Amazon Echo speaker itself be able to play music from my Sonos library? Will music accessible on my Sonos (Amazon Prime for example) be able to be triggered on the Sonos? Will I be able to trigger anything from my Sonos library from the Echo, even if the Echo doesn’t have that information stored within it?
These questions plague me. In the meantime, it is great to see that Sonos is thinking about deep integration and the long term. Check out this article about it:
I forgot to post this when it happened. Komp, a new musical handwriting app for iOS, was released in late April. Click here to download.
The Scoring Notes blog has a great review of it (read here). I have not spent nearly enough time with the app to review it fairly, but it did leave a very gut first impression on me.
The pricing model is subscription based (five dollars a month, fifty dollars a year). As someone who has embraced a number of subscription priced apps (Dropbox, Evernote, Microsoft Office, etc.) this isn't a bad thing. Whether you like it or not, this is the direction the industry is going. Komp is thinking forward with this model.
Komp is way prettier than most score apps out there, and this matters! Beautiful interfaces and intuitive designs have been made standard on iOS, and it is great to see professional music software by third parties coding with this priority in mind. Unfortunately, I do not find all of Komp's user interface very intuitive. It isn't so bad once you figure it out. I do wish the score setup screen would adhere better to some of the iOS interface standards for file management and new document creation. And I wish the introduction video did a better job showing where the finger/pencil are clicking and tapping. I saw what was happening on the screen, but not always exactly what I was supposed to tap to get there.
Scoring Notes also does a great job explaining how Komp interprets Appel Pencil input. In short, it interprets as you write instead of after you have completed a measure. This leads to some freedoms as well as some frustrations, all of which you can read in their review. In the short time I have used Komp, I still feel like I am fighting with it rather than writing freely and letting the software do it's work. Even though it is in some respects better looking and more powerful than competitors like NotateMe and MusicJot, I am not sure it has a place in my workflow yet. There were still too many mistakes in the processing of my pencil strokes that I would just rather write with real pencil and paper at first, and then later inputting into a piece of software like Sibelius or Dorico.
In other words, I am not sure Komp is a real revolution in handwriting notation on a tablet yet. But it is only a 1.0, and time will tell if this is a viable input method for composers.
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.
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:
Here are some of my favorite features that reddit users replied with:
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:
Music Ed Tech Talk 
You must be logged in to post a comment.