Communication and Collaboration Apps For Music Teams – OMEA 2025

CleanShot 2025-02-07 at 11.52.20@2x.

I am thrilled to be presenting four sessions at the Ohio Music Educators Association Professional Development Conference this weekend! My third session focuses on communication and collaboration apps for music teams.

If you’d like to attend, the session is on February 8 at 9:30 AM. If you’re already here or have attended, thank you for coming!

This post serves as a resource for session notes, including links to the primary tools I mention, and a complimentary podcast episode.

Complimentary Podcast Episode:

Where to Find Me

Subscribe to the Blog…RSS**** | Email Newsletter

Subscribe to the Podcast in…Apple Podcasts**** | Overcast | Castro | Spotify | RSS

Support My Work

Become a Patron!

Buy me a coffee

Links to Things Mentioned in the Session

Image.png

Image.png

Image.png

Image.png

Image.png

Image.png

Image.png

Image.png

Image.png

Image.png

Working with Digital Scores – OMEA 2025

CleanShot 2025-02-06 at 10.33.12@2x.

I am thrilled to be presenting four sessions at the Ohio Music Educators Association Professional Development Conference this weekend! My second session focuses on working with digital scores.

If you’d like to attend, the session is on February 7 at 5 PM. If you’re already here or have attended, thank you for coming!

This post serves as a resource for session notes, including links to the primary tools I mention in the session.

Apps for Scanning:
– Simple Scan
– Scanner Pro
– Apple Notes/Files

Apps for Scanning Notation
– Scoring Notes Article: Scanning the Current OMR Landscape
– Sheet Music Scanner
– Newzik
– Soundslice
– PlayScore 2
– SmartScore 64
– ScanScore 3

Apps for Managing Files
– Files App
– Dropbox
– Google Drive
– Documents
– Evernote

Apps for Working with Scores:
– forScore
– unReal Book
– Newzik

Notes on forScore:
– forScore Mac App Review
– Creating indexes with forScore
– The fastest way to get music into forScore
– forScore Automation Links

My Book:

Digital Organization Tips for Music Teachers

Buy on Amazon | Buy on Oxford University Press

View the video trailer

Digital Organization Tips for Music Teachers – OMEA 2025

CleanShot 2025-02-05 at 15.26.07@2x.

I am thrilled to be presenting four sessions at the Ohio Music Educators Association Professional Development Conference this weekend! My first session focuses on getting digitally organized in the music classroom.

If you’d like to attend, the session is on February 7 at 9:30 AM. If you’re already here or have attended, thank you for coming!

This post serves as a resource for session notes, including links to the primary tools I mention and a complimentary podcast episode.

Subscribe to the Blog…
RSS | Email Newsletter

Subscribe to the Podcast in…
Apple Podcasts | Overcast | Castro | Spotify | RSS

Support Music Ed Tech Talk

Become a Patron!

Buy me a coffeeBuy me a coffee

Show Notes:

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

Introducing Apple Invites, a new app that brings people together – Apple

New app from Apple. I like the fun design, but I wish it leaned more toward the streamlined scheduling approach of Calendly rather than the invitation-style feel of Evite.

Introducing Apple Invites, a new app that brings people together – Apple:

Apple today introduced Apple Invites, a new app for iPhone that helps users create custom invitations to gather friends and family for any occasion. With Apple Invites, users can create and easily share invitations, RSVP, contribute to Shared Albums, and engage with Apple Music playlists. Starting today, users can download Apple Invites from the App Store, or access it on the web through icloud.com/invites. iCloud+ subscribers can create invitations, and anyone can RSVP, regardless of whether they have an Apple Account or Apple device.

Keep reading here…CleanShot 2025-02-04 at 14.52.16@2x.

Apple in 2024: The Six Colors report card

CleanShot 2025-02-04 at 14.48.06@2x.

As someone who uses and thinks about Apple computers quite a lot, this read from Six Colors is always interesting.

Apple in 2024: The Six Colors report card – Six Colors:

It’s time for our annual look back on Apple’s performance during the past year, as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple. The whole idea here is to get a broad sense of sentiment—the “vibe in the room”—regarding the past year. (And by looking at previous survey results, we can even see how that sentiment has drifted over the course of an entire decade.)

This is the tenth year that I’ve presented this survey to my hand-selected group. They were prompted with 14 different Apple-related subjects, and asked to rate them on a scale from 1 (worst) to 5 (best) and optionally provide text commentary per category.
Keep reading here…

If you ask me, here’s how I’d rate Apple right now:

  • Mac: B – Mac hardware is better than ever, but macOS is cluttered with intrusive privacy popups. I’ve never found the operating system more distracting or off-putting.

  • iPhone: B – Battery life on my iPhone 16 Pro Max isn’t as good as my last phone, but I’m loving the new camera button for quick shots of my kid.

  • iPad: C – The latest iPads are great refinements of the 2018 iPad Pro design, but the software remains ok at lots of things, and not a great computer. Just put macOS on it.

  • Wearables: C – AirPods 4 and the new health features in AirPods Pro 2 are highlights, but the Vision Pro is a miss. It’s the first new Apple product category I haven’t felt tempted to buy… ever?

  • Watch: C – I love the Apple Watch, but OS updates and widgets feel half-considered. I never know whether I’ll see my watch face or the widget screen when I glance at my wrist. The Siri watch face and developer API seem abandoned, and Apple needs to figure out how to bring back the blood oxygen sensor in the U.S. before I consider upgrading.

  • Home: E – No meaningful updates. The Apple Home ecosystem remains unreliable, and the smart home industry still feels as chaotic as it did in 2019.

  • Apple TV: D – It’s odd to rate this so low because it’s still the best streaming box by very far, but Apple rarely updates the OS or expands its potential. There’s so much more I’d love them to do.

  • Services: C – Apple TV+ is decent, the news and game subscriptions are forgettable, and iCloud is passable but still not rock-solid.

  • Hardware Reliability: A – If there’s one thing Apple still nails, it’s hardware reliability.

  • Developer Relationship: E – Watching Apple handle EU regulations this past year has made it clear: their business practices hurt developers and users alike. It appears that any real improvement will require regulation.

  • World Impact: E – Given how much Apple prioritizes profit over progress in personal computing, it’s hard not to see them as more of a force for harm than good these days.

Cantai: AI-Powered Vocal Synthesis for Opera and Choral Music

David MacDonald turned me on to this vocal plugin for DAWs and notation software. I don’t know anything about this company, but the demo is pretty interesting.

Cantai:

Cantai, created by composer Richard deCosta, is a groundbreaking AI-powered vocal synthesis platform designed to transform written scores into lifelike operatic and choral performances.
Keep reading here…

CleanShot 2025-01-29 at 11.56.45.

The People App

The forthcoming People app caught my attention when it came across my timeline last week.

I always find these kinds of projects fascinating, especially because I enjoy organizing the connections between the people I know and the contexts in which I interact with them.

It’s hard to say how useful it will be without a more detailed overview of the user interface, but what’s neat is that it syncs both ways with the Contacts app.

People: Contacts Reimagined — Hidden Spectrum:

It’s starts with a time, and a place.
Keep reading here…

CleanShot 2025-01-26 at 14.46.25.

OpenAI’s Operator AI

The Verge reports on OpenAI’s new AI agent feature.

It seems like it will be quite a while before this kind of computing becomes reliable and normalized, but I am definitely excited about it. I think a lot of discourse about AI is filled with misplaced anger and fear, especially in artistic and teaching communities. These AI tools certainly present significant ethical issues, but what they accomplish for humans is not something I struggle with. They are bad at art and, honestly, still pretty bad at understanding. However, what they excel at is automation.

I have spent time getting comfortable with various automation apps, utilities, and languages to speed up some of my mobile and desktop computing workflows. Apps like Shortcuts, Automator, and Keyboard Maestro have been incredibly helpful over the years. However, web apps are painfully difficult to automate, and as major platform owners like Google, Meta, and Amazon continue to lock down their ecosystems, it becomes even harder for third-party apps to meaningfully manipulate these sites on the user’s behalf.

The most hopeful and optimistic take on AI is that, in the next few years, we’ll start to see it take less of a “me-too” role inside our apps and websites and instead evolve into something that can act on our behalf—stringing together cumbersome, multi-step actions and automating tasks we already perform consistently but manually.

Hopefully, Operator AI helps to instigate that trend.

OpenAI’s new Operator AI agent can do things on the web for you – The Verge:

OpenAI is releasing a “research preview” of an AI agent called Operator that can “go to the web to perform tasks for you,” according to a blog post. “Using its own browser, it can look at a webpage and interact with it by typing, clicking, and scrolling,” OpenAI says.
Keep reading here…

CleanShot 2025-01-26 at 14.44.18.

The Sound of… BLUEY!!! — Twenty Thousand Hertz

Would you like some Bluey content? This episode of Twenty Thousand Hertz features the show’s sound designed and mixer Dan Brumm and discusses several aspects of the show’s sound, including the timing of the theme song.

Fun listen.

The Sound of… BLUEY!!! — Twenty Thousand Hertz – The stories behind the world’s most recognizable and interesting sounds.:

Since its debut in 2018, Bluey has become one of the most popular and beloved TV shows of all time. In this episode, Bluey’s sound designer and mixer Dan Brumm walks us through how the show began, the unique challenges of season one, and the lengths he goes to give the show its organic sound. Plus, Dallas reveals the secret timing of the Bluey theme song.
Keep reading here…