Apple Acquires Workflow!

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!

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.

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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?

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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.

The Logic file was originally stored in the “Logic” folder from within my “Music” folder.
The “macOS GarageBand” that I saved the GarageBand version of that Logic file to.
The “iOS GarageBand” folder that I had to send the iOS version of the file to.
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…

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.

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.

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iOS 9.3 Preview

Apple has released a preview of iOS 9.3. This update is in beta and will contain many new decent features. Nothing big, but stuff that Apple typically does not add to their operating systems mid-year. This a much welcome change and allows Apple to stay current in ways that they could not on an annual software release cycle. I am really happy to see Apple Music features in the car, thumbprint protected notes, and suggested apps that can feed the data in the Health app. Also interesting is the Night Shift feature which will warm the colors of your screen when it gets dark at night to make it easier on your eyes. This is just a month or so after the developers of f.lux (popular screen temperature app for the desktop) figured out how to release it for iOS through process of sideloading only for Apple to ask them to remove it soon afterwards.

Most surprising to me is the last section on the iPad in education. It looks like Apple is adding multiple user accounts to the iPad for classrooms and is adding a classroom management app. This is interesting especially because of CEO Tim Cook’s recent comments to Buzzfeed when asked about the growing ubiquity of Chromebooks in the classroom.

Google’s Chromebooks have overtaken Apple products as the most popular devices in American classrooms, but Apple CEO Tim Cook says the company will not be following the search giant’s approach to the education market, which has been a stronghold for Apple since the early days of the Mac.

“Assessments don’t create learning,” Cook said in an interview with BuzzFeed News Wednesday, calling the cheap laptops that have proliferated through American classrooms mere “test machines.”

“We are interested in helping students learn and teachers teach, but tests, no,” Cook said. “We create products that are whole solutions for people — that allow kids to learn how to create and engage on a different level.”

Apple has been deeply connected to schools since it first rolled out mass market personal computers in the 1980s, and has long offered big discounts to students and teachers. But its education market share has been snatched away by the Google-branded Chromebooks, which are outselling not just Apple but everyone else in the tech business.

I am very excited about these new features, what it means for Apple to break the annual software release cycle, and how they might fight for their place in the classroom.

My favorite apps of 2015

I feel the need to defend these apps in a way that I didn’t for my favorite albums of 2015 list I posted yesterday. In part, this is because music’s role in my life has a certain type of inevitability that makes it difficult for me to immediately understand its value myself. Secondly, the music I experienced this past year is worth so many more words than I could possibly type. Finally, apps, especially paid ones, tend to require a defense; a “why do I need to buy this?” Their value is also often technical and practical, and can be condensed down into a few sentences.

Productivity

Documents by Readdle

I can’t remember what getting work done on an iPad or iPhone felt like before discovering this app. Think of this as the missing Finder on iOS.

Due

My new favorite for setting timers and reminders. I like how persistently it bugs me until I actually complete the task.

Workflow

Unbelievable automator for creating multi step workflows on iOS.

Scannable

For getting all physical paper into the cloud as beautifully formatted, text searchable, PDFs. Syncs effortlessly to Evernote, lightning fast, and zero step scanning.

Apple Notes

Stellar update this year to the notes app that comes bundled with Apple devices. I love the rich text formatting, web clipping, and list support.

OmniGraffle

A great app by the makers of two of my favorites: OmniFocus and OmniOutliner. OmniGraffle has come to replace Adobe Illustrator for me. It is my go-to for designing graphics. Specifically, I use it to design seating charts for my classes.

IFTTT

Amazing service for linking different internet connected services and devices. You can create if-then statements to automate them. Example: If I am tagged in a Facebook post, save that photo to my Dropbox. Another example: When I arrive at home, then turn on the lights in my house.

Paprika

Cooking game changer! My wife and I clip recipes from the web into this app and it formats them beautifully so we can isolate ingredients, directions, and set timers. It has a built in grocery list and meal planning feature that can send data to Apple Reminders and Calendar apps, respectively.

Overcast

I have been listening to a lot of podcasts this year. Overcast offers the best experience of all the podcast apps I have tried.

Music

forScore

Not a new app to me but I have really taken to organizing my scores on the iPad with this app over the last year. It has truly revolutionized my musical workflow throughout my band directing, private teaching, gigging, and church music directing jobs.

Tempo

Still my favorite metronome app on iOS.

Tunable

My favorite tuning app. Features gamified tuning, polyphonic tuning drones, just intonation, and simultaneous metronome and tuner playback.

Health

Using these apps (and more) in combination with the Apple Health app and Apple Watch, I have lost about 30 pounds since late August. Ok, really, I worked out and changed my diet some, but the apps helped.

Waterminder

Helps me set goals for water consumption and see my progress each day. Logging water is easy with the Apple Watch app and all data syncs to the Apple Health app.

Lark

This app is fun for tracking work outs and food, but I use it primarily to track the hours I sleep each night. It accomplishes this through the motion of my iPhone.

myfitnesspal

I have been using this app to track calorie and nutrition data for almost a year now. Really easy and addictive to use once you get into a routine.

Spire

This app, in combination with the wearable tracker by the same name, has allowed me to track trends in my breathing for the last few months. The app categorizes my breathing patterns into “focus,” “tense,” “calm,” and “activity.” When it senses a streak of tension, it sends my watch a message to breathe slower. It also allows me to set goals for minutes of focus per day, offers guided meditation, and syncs respiratory rate data to Apple Health.

Home

All of these require home automated hardware to be useful. By recommending them, I am recommending the devices themselves as well.

Harmony

Automated TV remote. No more fuss over HDMI inputs and multiple remotes. This app controls all of the things plugged into my TV and allows me to trigger different things on and off with simple one tap button presses.

Philips Hue

Lights that connect to wifi. These can be controlled from a phone app, automated with services like IFTTT, and commanded with Siri.

Sonos

High quality speakers that connect to one another over a home wifi network.

Games

Crossy Road

Shooty Skies

PAC-MAN 265

iOS 9

iOS 9 was released this past week. I have been running the beta on my iPhone and iPad since late July and it is just really a great update.

Here are a few unsorted thoughts on the update:

– Battery life. Battery management has improved tremendously. I can actually get through most days using my phone like a normal person without needing a recharge at 3pm. Low power mode is also a nice touch. At 20 percent, my phone offers to conserve battery life by doing things like turning down the backlight and restricting apps from running in the background.

– Power features on iPad. Now the iPad can view two apps on the screen at once. You can also close out of an app you are watching a video on and the video will stay visible in the corner of the screen even when you leave and enter into other apps. I also love the keyboard update. Dragging with two fingers on the iPad keyboard turns it into a curser. No more pressing and holding to use that flakey magnifying glass.

– Spotlight for all apps! Now any app can allow you to search its contents from the Spotlight search, making it really easy to search apps like Dropbox and Documents. Sadly, Evernote has not enabled this feature yet.

– Siri is quiet. Small thing. But I love that Siri does not make a “boop” sound when activated anymore.

– Proactivity. Now my phone tells me when I need to leave for my next appointment based on my calendar and traffic info. It also searches the signatures of emails sent to me to suggest the names of people who are calling me if their names are not in my contacts list. Some of these features are lackluster. For example, going to the Spotlight search is supposed to suggest to you the apps you use and the people it thinks you might want to interact with based on usage patterns. I have found it to more often just suggest recently opened apps. But I have been noticing all sorts of other features of this nature that Apple has quietly added. For example, today I got in my car and booted up Apple Maps. The first option for directions was to my friend’s house. The address had a mail icon next to it. I can only assume that Maps looked in my mail and saw the email from that friend inviting me to a party, including both that days date and his address, so it connected the dots and suggested that I might be driving there at that time. Fantastic!

– Another great example of Proactivity. Every morning, I launch an app that my school system uses to take student attendance on. Now, around the start of my first period class every morning, my iPad has been showing me a tiny version of the icon for that app in the lower left corner of the screen. All I have to do is touch it and swipe up to instantly launch into that app.

– You can now search for different parts of the Settings app!

– The new system wide font looks great.

– Maps is smarter and more accurate than ever before.

– Reminders stay on the lock screen until they are checked off to be extra remind-y.

– The new Notes app is awesome. But it is just not going to replace Evernote for me.

If you have been scared to update an Apple device before due to them being buggy or taking up too much space, I would still encourage you to download iOS 9 immediately. Not only does it have all the features listed above and more, but it really does feel a hundred more times polished than the updates of the past few years.

Here are a few of my favorite reviews of the operating system so far:

iOS 9: The MacStories Review, Created on iPad | FEDERICO VITICCI

iOS 9 Review | RENE RITCHIE

🔗 The Tragedy of iTunes and Classical Music

Robinson Meyer’s The Tragedy of iTunes and Classical Music is the best thing I have read all week. It is a perfect overview of the problems haunting serious music geeks when it comes to archiving large and complex music collections in iTunes.

When the developer Erik Kemp designed the first metadata system for MP3s in 1996, he provided only three options for attaching text to the music. Every audio file could be labeled with only an artist, song name, and album title.

Kemp’s system has since been augmented and improved upon, but never replaced. Which makes sense: Like the web itself, his schema was shipped, good enough, and an improvement on the vacuum which preceded it. Those three big tags, as they’re called, work well with pop and rock written between 1960 and 1995. This didn’t prevent rampant mislabeling in the early days of the web, though, as anyone who remembers Napster can tell you. His system stumbles even more, though, when it needs to capture hip hop’s tradition of guest MCs or jazz’s vibrant culture of studio musicianship.

And they really, really fall apart when they need to classify classical music.

Read the whole thing, it’s great! File this under “things I wish I had written myself.”

Apple Music Wish List for an iTunes Edge Case

Apple Music is coming out. Apple’s purchase of Beats last year, in addition to a ton of recent rumors, makes it pretty clear that a new iTunes update is going to be announced at Apple’s software developer conference, WWDC, on Monday. It will likely integrate the Beats streaming music catalogue into iTunes on all Apple devices and introduce some new features.

I am currently a happy Spotify user. I am also a pretty efficient dude. I hate using two music apps and cannot wait to use just iTunes for all of my musical needs. I am also an extreme edge case when it comes to digital music libraries. I am not a casual listener. I am an archivist. iTunes is not just a way to casually listen to my favorite songs. It is a tool for managing educational resources, searching for recordings spanning a lot of genres and time periods, and general purpose audio file organization. My iTunes Library is about 600 GB and I have no wish to massively downsize it any time soon.

Below, I have detailed some wishes for Apple’s new streaming service. Some of these suggestions will likely be announced on Monday. Others are reasonable but not going to happen just yet. And a few are incredibly unlikely just on the premise that Apple is not going to pump major resources into features that are appealing only to me and not the mass market.

Unify local and streaming playlists, make them both feel native

I want to search for Snarky Puppy and see the albums of theirs that I own, and those on Apple’s streaming service. And I want them all to appear in a smartly organized list where all of them are ready for playback as if they were living on my computer’s hard drive.

When I find something in Apple’s streaming database, I want to add it to my music library and playlists and have those songs appear alongside the ones I own, listenable offline if I so choose.

Separate iTunes on the Mac

What is the worst part of Apple bundling a streaming music service into iTunes? iTunes is a terrible app. It is slow, bloated with features, and used for a ton of things beyond music listening.

I hope Apple takes a cue from the iPhone and separates iTunes on the Mac into five separate apps: Music, video, podcasts, iTunes University, and iTunes Store. Bonus points for separating any current iTunes features relating to the upkeep of an iOS device into a separate app.

iTunes Match upgrade

Paid storage

I currently subscribe to iTunes Match, a service that uploads your iTunes library to the cloud. Songs that are on the iTunes Store are matched, other audio files are uploaded. There is a 25,000 song limit for files that are not on the iTunes Store. Hopefully the pending update to Apple’s music services will allow users to upgrade their storage limit and use iCloud Drive storage that they have purchased towards more file uploads.

Support for all audio files

There are audio file types that iTunes supports on a Mac but will not sync over the cloud. Hopefully Apple fixes this in the coming update. I want to access my entire library on the go, not just those that Apple deems valid.

Better metadata and search

It would be fantastic if iTunes could use its new streaming catalogue to clean up my album art and other poorly organized information. In some cases, I have attempted to do this manually and iTunes Match has actually reverted back to old cloud backups, undoing tedious work.

In my perfect world, iTunes would also allow me to tag music and consistently add information to tracks and albums including but not limited to: personnel on jazz recordings, director/ensemble/composer on classical recordings, record labels, etc. It would be even better if iTunes could differentiate, say, a recording of works by Beethoven, properly tagging each work with the various conductors and ensembles that performed them. This metadata could be cloud based and crowd sourced. For example, I could elect to add it myself, and have it sync across devices[1] or choose to have my files augmented with popular user submitted data. If this were not already useful enough for better organizing and searching a personal library, imagine now how powerful this becomes if it is built into the global search of iTunes. For example, I could search for “recordings of Fritz Reiner and Chicago Symphony Orchestra between 1956–1960,” “albums that John Coltrane played on,” or “records released on Blue Note.”

It would also be really interesting if Apple would extend their system wide tagging feature to iTunes songs. I would love to tag audio files with keywords and have them appear with other files with the same tag in the Finder. I could, for example, tag a recording of my middle school band with “Lake Elkhorn Middle School.” When searching for this tag in the Finder, I would be greeted with all of the documents on my hard drive that I have tagged this, alongside related iTunes files.

Lyrics

Here is a feature for both power users and the masses. Allow for better support with lyrics. I should never have to leave my music app to see the lyrics of a song. Ideally, these could appear with the click of a button, with each word highlighted in real time,[2] and the possibility to easily copy and paste them.

Simple social

Keep this one simple, Apple. Here is all you need: add friends, share playlists, follow playlists, follow playback, one click sharing to social media.

Never happening

I have always wanted iTunes to allow for third party plugins. I find myself often slowing down and looping small sections of music for practice or educational purposes. It would be cool if these power features could be added to iTunes so that I did not need to start up a project in GarageBand or Pro Tools every time I want to do something as simple as slow down a track or splice out a short audio sample. Oh well…

We will see what happens on Monday. I am banking on the streaming and playlist features I mentioned above. There will probably be some attempt to make radio more engaging by perhaps the hiring of artists to DJ human curated stations. Expect some simple social features as well.

If you didn’t notice, iOS devices do NOT support the viewing and editing of metadata added on OSX. ↩
Spotify has this and it is great! ↩