New Software Coming from Apple (And What You Can Do With It)

Its been a busy few weeks as I have been wrapping up the end of a tough school year. While I am late to getting this week’s podcast episode out, I have been working on this site and have a bunch of content to share in the coming week.

I managed to sneak in enough time during the last week of school to watch Apple’s WWDC Keynote and to talk about it on Music Ed Tech Talk with Craig McClellan (cohost of my other podcast, The Class Nerd).

It was an opportunity to take a nice break from the challenging end-of-year procedures, and to think about how Apple’s fall software updates will impact how I get work done in the classroom. Listen below.

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Robby and Craig break down the announcements from Apple’s Word Wide Developer Conference and discuss how teachers might use the upcoming features to their latest software updates.

Show Notes:

Album of the Week:
Robby – Bones by Michael Mayo
Craig McClellan – Sour by Olivia Rodrigo

App of the Week:
Robby – Timery for the Mac
Craig McClellan – Music Harbor

Tech Tip of the Week:
Robby – Transpose Chrome Extension
Craig McClellan – Feedbin

Where to Find Us:
Robby – Twitter | Blog | Book
Craig McClellan – Twitter

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

The Prime Directive, featuring Will Kuhn and Ethan Hein (Music Ed Tech Talk Podcast #32)

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Description

Ethan and Will join the show to talk about their book Electronic Music School, the Prime Directive, writing apps, and the future of the iPad.

Thanks to this week’s sponsor, the DMV Percussion Academy. Leran more and registere here.

Chapters:

  • 00:00:00 – Intro
  • 00:01:25 – Sponsor: DMV Percussion Academy
  • 00:02:03 – Star Trek
  • 00:04:18 – Electronic Music School
  • 00:10:09 – Teaching Underlying Musical Concepts of Electronic Music Styles
  • 00:18:33 – Perceived Threat by Traditional Performing Arts Teachers
  • 00:24:28 – Teaching Songwriting
  • 00:27:23 – Scaffolding
  • 00:37:15 – Fighting Racism with Music Education
  • 00:48:37 – The Prime Directive
  • 00:52:34 – Staying Relevant?
  • 01:07:15 – We Live on Twitter
  • 01:07:15 – Writing Apps
  • 01:13:21 – Bedtime
  • 01:16:07 – The M1 iPad Pro
  • 01:35:51 – Tech Tip of the Week
  • 01:38:14 – Album of the Week
  • 01:41:07 – App of the Week
  • 01:43:24 – Closing

Show Notes:

App of the Week:
Robby – Tot
Will – In Haler Radio
Ethan – Figure

Album of the Week:
Robby – Tauk – Shapeshifter II: Outbreak
Will – Suburban Lawns – Janitor (Original Video)
Ethan – Clipping – The Deep

Where to Find Us:
Robby – Twitter | Blog | Book
Will – Twitter | Website
Ethan – Twitter | Website

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

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🎙 METT Episode #28 – Rehearse Your Ensembles Remotely

Robby explains the software, hardware, and teaching strategies he uses to run engaging and effective music rehearsals in a remote or hybrid environment.

This information was presented earlier this month at the Maryland Music Educators Association conference. The notes and links below are from the session notes of that presentation.

Learn More From Me About Technology

Website – robbyburns.com

Blog – Music Ed Tech Talk (musicedtechtalk.com)

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Abstract

Learn the strategies and technologies to run engaging synchronous rehearsals. Engage students visually and speed up your flow using Open Broadcasting Software. Pump the sound video/music/play-along tracks directly through Zoom or Google Meet for a lag-free experience. Explore play along with resources, student reflection with Google Docs, effective camera/mic practices, and have students working collaboratively in synchronous chamber ensembles with Soundtrap! Software discussed includes: Keynote, Google Slides, Loopback, Soundsource, Farrago, AnyTune, Soundtrap, Smartmusic!

Broadcasting Software

Audio Routing

Making Play Along Tracks

Visual Presentation

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🎙 Music Ed Tech Talk #27 – Catching Up With Shawna Longo, with Shawna Longo

Shawna Longo joins the show to talk about our hybrid teaching gear, social emotional learning, cloud-based music tools, and our favorite apps/albums/tech tips of the week.

Topics include:

  • COVID hybrid teaching strategies
  • Teaching hardware (on a cart!)
  • Teaching performance virtually
  • social emotional learning
  • music tools in the cloud
  • the Canvas mastery grade book

Show Notes:

Tech Tips of the Week:
Robby – Command+K (or Control+K) will create a hyperlink
Shawna – Mute All for Google Meet | Use AirPod mic as input in Google Meet

App of the Week:
Robby – TIDAL
Shawna – Scannable

Album of the Week:
Robby – Future Nostalgia – Dua Lipa
Shawna – Happiness Begins – The Jonas Brothers

Where to Find Us:
Robby – Twitter | Blog | Book
Shawna – Twitter | Website

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

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Subscribe to the Podcast in…
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#20 – Electronic Music School, with Will Kuhn

Will Kuhn joins the show to talk about Apple’s new Macs, teaching electronic music, home automation, and his forthcoming book, Electronic Music School.

Show Notes:

We recorded this episode right after last weeks Apple event! People have now used and reviewed these machines! I recommend this one, this one, and this one.

Other topics include:

  • Apple in education
  • M1 chip implications for audio software
  • Other Apple Fall announcements and products
  • Ableton Live 11

Do you have a product or service you would like to promote to music educators? Sponsor Music Ed Tech Talk!

Stuff mentioned:

App of the Week:
Robby – Neural Mix Pro
Will – Ableton Live 11

Album of the Week:
Robby – Vulfpeck | The Joy of Music The Job of Real Estate
Will – Machinedrum – A View of U | beabadoobee

Where to Find Us:
Robby – Twitter | Blog | Book
Will – Twitter | Website

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

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Sponsor Music Ed Tech Talk!

🎙 #13 – Exploring Noteflight Learn, with John Mlynczak

John Mlynczak returns to the show to discuss Noteflight’s new integration with Sound Check and offers advice to educators about teaching online this fall, and what we can learn from it.

Show Notes:

App of the Week:
Robby – Kindle/Audible |
John – TikTok

Album of the Week:
Robby – Igor Levit – Beethoven Piano Sonatas |
John – Hamilton on Disney+

Where to Find Us:
Robby – Twitter | Blog | Book |
John – Twitter

Subscribe to Music Ed Tech Talk:

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🎙 Introducing Music Ed Tech Talk, My New(ish) Podcast!

Today I am excited to announce that my podcast, Robby Burns + Friends, is getting a long overdue re-brand. I am renaming the show Music Ed Tech Talk. It will continue to follow the candid guest/host conversation style and will focus on music, education, technology, and other mutual interests.

Given my investment in the fields of music and education, and my intense interest in technology, most episodes of Robby Burns + Friends were already centered on these topics. I felt it was time to rebrand the show to better indicate to new listeners what they should expect when they press play.

That being said, I see this show, in combination with my blog, to be my digital megaphone, so don’t be surprised to hear me venture into the unknown. This is not a show about music technology education. It is a show about music, education, and technology. Three separate interests, sometimes discussed in isolation, sometimes in combination, and sometimes not at all. What I am saying is — don’t be surprised to hear occasional digressions on Star Wars and pickling. 

I am hosting this show in the same place so you should expect to keep getting episodes in your feed if you were subscribed to Robby Burns + Friends. If not, please let me know. I am keeping the first three seasons of RB+F in the Apple Podcasts Directory under the new title because I feel that they are, spiritually speaking, the same show. I will be tightening up the format a little bit, and am planning to speak with new and exciting guests.

That about sums it up. Ushering in this new season of Music Ed Tech Talk is my very first guest ever, Jon Tippens. You can listen to the new episode and read the show notes here or click play right below.

Show Notes:

@ryebot on Twitter, designer of my new artwork

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, Betty Edwards

The Natural Rider, Mary Wanless

The Inner Game of Tennis, Timothy Galloway

Lynda.com – Online software tutorials

Teaching Musical Performance, Daniel Kohut

OmniFocus – Accomplish More Every Day

Things by Cultured Code

Reid Stefan – Audio tutorials with puppets

Be Focused Pro – Pomodoro App for Mac and iOS

App of the Week: 

Robby – Safari on iPad OS

Jon – Time by bluecocoa

Album of the Week:

Robby – Snarky Puppy Live in Stockholm, 2015

Jon – Dawn of MIDI – Dysnominia

Where to Find Us:

Jon Tippens: Twitter 

Robby Burns: Twitter | Blog

Subscribe to Music Ed Tech Talk:

Apple Podcasts | Overcast | Castro | Spotify | RSS

iOS apps I would love to see come to the Mac, a musician’s perspective

There has been a lot of buzz lately around ‘Marzipan,’ a set of developer tools that Apple is making to help third party developers more easily port their iOS apps to macOS. It is heavily rumored that Apple will detail this initiative at their developer conference, WWDC, this June (during the keynote on June 3rd).

Last year at WWDC, Apple unveiled four Mac apps that use this new set of tools to bring iPad-like versions of iOS apps to the Mac. The apps launched were Home, Stocks, Voice Memos, and News. The apps have been met with much criticism for their lack of Mac-likeness. For example, when you double click a news article in the News app, you can’t see an article in a separate window, a behavior you would expect from the Mail app or Notes app on Mac. Likewise, the Home app, when setting up a time based automation displays they iOS style date picker, with scrollable numbers, rather than the calendar like interface that you would see when selecting a date in traditional Mac apps.

I agree that these four Mac apps are garbage, but I would much rather have the utility of them than not. Even if all these Mac apps do are act like iPad apps that accept input from a cursor instead of a finger, I would still kill to have any of the following on macOS:

Tonal Energy Tuner. There are no tuning drone based apps, even on the web, that do 1/100th of what this iOS app does. My Mac is my primary device for sharing audio and visuals with my students during class. This would get used every single day.

forScore. I have a weird way of managing my digital sheet music using the file system of my Mac, but then importing duplicate copies into my iPad’s forScore library. It would be really nice to have one place where this is all managed across all devices. Of course, this would require forScore to sync a library across devices, which the team has told me is too difficult a task to prioritize currently.

Twitter. Twitter killed their Mac app recently and as someone who recently started using their app on iOS (Tweetbot is still far better but Twitter no longer provides the proper APIs for them to stay up to date on modern features), I would really prefer to not use the web browser on the Mac.

Apollo. To my knowledge, there has never been a good Reddit client on any non-mobile device. Apollo is great.

Facebook Messenger. I hate Facebook but it is a necessary communication tool. I would love to use it for that without going to their stupid website ever again.

Overcast. My favorite podcast player. Would love to have it on Mac.

Health. An app that excels in showing me data on graphs and charts sure would be useful on the big screen of a Mac.

Due. My favorite reminder app is already on Mac but it looks gross.

Instapaper. I use ReadKit on the Mac as an Instapaper client on Mac now, but would not mind something more minimal. Instapaper is the perfect candidate for a Marzipan app for its simplicity.

Instagram. Who wouldn’t want this on Mac?

Tempo. There is only one good metronome app on the Mac (Dr. Betotte). Opening up UIKit to Mac developers would bring a whole lot of competition in this space. Frozen Ape’s Tempo would be my first choice to get ported over.

AnyList. Their Mac app is already just a gross port of their iOS app. Using Apple’s tools would surely make it prettier and more responsive.

Ferrite Recording Studio. My podcast audio editor of choice is only on iPad. It sure would be cool to use these tools on a bigger screen with keyboard and mouse.

🔗 Marco Arment releases public beta of his podcasting tool, Forecast

From Jason Snell’s Six Colors blog…

Forecast: A must-have tool for Mac podcasters—>

Marco Arment’s Forecast is a newly released (into a public beta) Mac MP3 encoding and tagging tool for podcasters. It’s a tool that Marco built a couple of years ago to serve his own needs, and for the last 18 months or so I’ve been using it (in a private beta) to encode most of the podcasts that I create. Here’s an overview of how Forecast works and what it does.

I have been waiting for this for a long time.

Marco is behind Tumblr, Instapaper, and now the great podcast app, Overcast. He is an avid podcaster and really knows his stuff. I can’t wait to take this for a spin while editing my next show. The feature I am perhaps looking the most forward to is the ability to import Logic markers as chapters.