Tag: music education

🔗 Chris Russell’s early thoughts on the iPad Pro

If you ask me, Chris Russell’s Technology in Music Education blog is one of the places on the web to read about music technology in education. Chris is a big time proponent and writer on using iPads in music ed. He is also a great hold out when it comes to resisting new tech and pushing his current technology to its near death. As a reckless early adopter I admire him for this.

Chris just updated his iPad to the large 12.9 pro model. This device was updated recently alongside an all new 10.5 inch sized pro model. I hear that the 120Hz refresh rate on the screen of both these new models is out of this world. Needless to say, now that Chris is using an iPad Pro, I am curious to see what he will write about it in the coming months. 

His early thoughts are in keeping with this theme, basically stating that the iPad Pro is a monster piece of hardware desperately waiting for the productivity features of iOS 11 this fall.

A few days with the new 12.9″ iPad Pro | Technology in Music Education:

I have been putting off the purchase of a new iPad for some time–and it was time to upgrade.

That iPad arrived on Tuesday, and I have been using the iPad Pro in my daily life for the past three days.  I have been reading a lot about the iPad Pro models on all of the technology news outlets.  The general consensus is that the iPad Pro is wonderful, but it costs a lot.  This sounds like typical Apple to me.  That said, my 2008 MacBook (which I am still using) was pretty expensive ($1500 if memory serves), but it is still working for me nearly 9 years later. 

I have been integrating the iPad Pro into my life, and for the most part, what I have to say is this: it is a big iPad that does what iPads do.  I am able to do some more split screen activities as the size better allows for it, and it is wonderful for reading music.

🎬 Adding an Index for Your Real Books in forScore

forScore 10 adds a feature that allows you to add indexes to large scores by uploading a CSV file that links the song titles to specific page numbers of the PDF. This is especially useful for real and fake books that have hundreds of songs all associated with one giant file. A competing score app called unrealBook pioneered this feature to my knowledge. I used to keep it installed on my iPad just for that one feature, but now, I can do everything I need to in forScore.

I created a video tutorial of how to accomplish this. See below:

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 You can find the index files I reference in the video here. 

I don’t have a full technical understanding of how this feature works, so I tried to avoid explaining what is going on with the file. I think I am explaining it well enough that if you imitate my steps, you will be successful in most attempts. If there is anything unclear, let me know and I will try to clarify it in a future post.

One thing I did not cover in the video are the page offset settings at the bottom of the index settings screen. I have attached about 10 indexes to my forScore library and only twice did I need to use those buttons. In some cases, the CSV score may be offset by a few pages leading to the index not linking you to the correct songs. In these cases, I simply fiddled around with the plus and minus buttons until I got the result I wanted. I would be happy to redo the video with that step included if enough people are interested.