Why this app needs to exist and exactly what kind of problem it solves has been covered a little bit here on the blog and on the podcast over the years. I have been using and recomending IDAGIO for some time now.

I have been using Apple Music Classical a lot since last night, and while it leaves a lot to be desired (like an iPad, Mac, and car app!), it is good enough for me to replace IDAGIO.

The fact that it links to my existing Apple Music account and library means that I can continue using the standard Apple Music app in combination with it. One library for all of my music, but two app interfaces to interact with it, depending on which context makes the most sense.

I plan to cover this app on the podcast some time soon. You can download Apple Music Classical here.

Robby Burns

December 31, 2022

Original Post, Link Post

The 50 Best Albums Of 2022: NPR

Robby Burns

December 31, 2022

Original Post, Link Post

Ever since NPR started putting these playlists on Apple Music and Spotify, I haven't been compiling them. I guess there was some value in that process, because I almost forgot to check out the list this year!

Read more, and find music streaming links below.

The 50 Best Albums Of 2022 (50-41) : NPR

A year like this one makes hand-wringing about the death of the album seem silly (if anything we should be concerned about the single). Musicians gave us experiences in 2022. Immersive, ambitious, focused, sprawling, explosive, swerving albums expressed their power in any number of ways: Vibes to make summer stretch on into the year's cold months. Bottomless layers of invention. History lessons that sparkled like the best party you could imagine. There were too many great albums to count, let alone narrow down to a round number. But here are 50 that made us feel awe, ache or adoration, selected and ranked by the contributors, public radio partners and staff of NPR Music. (Oh, and we also ranked the 100 Best Songs of 2022.)

Robby Burns

September 7, 2021

Original Post, Link Post

Apple acquires classical music streaming service Primephonic

Robby Burns

September 7, 2021

Original Post, Link Post

Last week, Apple aquired classical music streaming service Primephonic. This service is very similar to [IDAGIO](https://idagio.com) which I use and have written about here before.

[Apple acquires classical music streaming service Primephonic - Apple-->](https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/08/apple-acquires-classical-music-streaming-service-primephonic/)

CUPERTINO, CALIFORNIA AND LONDON Apple today announced it has acquired Primephonic, the renowned classical music streaming service that offers an outstanding listening experience with search and browse functionality optimized for classical, premium-quality audio, handpicked expert recommendations, and extensive contextual details on repertoire and recordings.

With the addition of Primephonic, Apple Music subscribers will get a significantly improved classical music experience beginning with Primephonic playlists and exclusive audio content. In the coming months, Apple Music Classical fans will get a dedicated experience with the best features of Primephonic, including better browsing and search capabilities by composer and by repertoire, detailed displays of classical music metadata, plus new features and benefits.

Primephonic is no longer available for new subscribers and will be taken offline beginning September 7. Apple Music plans to launch a dedicated classical music app next year combining Primephonic’s classical user interface that fans have grown to love with more added features. In the meantime, current Primephonic subscribers will receive six months of Apple Music for free, providing access to hundreds of thousands of classical albums, all in Lossless and high-resolution audio, as well as hundreds of classical albums in Apple Music’s Spatial Audio, with new albums added regularly.

I would have never guessed that a company as big as Apple would dedicate resources to solving a problem like classical music metadata but I will take it. This will mean that I can use my same Apple Music account, library, and payment, and get a superior searching experience. Viewed simply as a utility, this seems like a win.

I wonder if this means that Apple is aware and working on the many other musical metadata problems in other styles. For example, in jazz, it would be great to search a recording by personnel, soloists, recording enegeniers, and more.

Robby Burns

February 23, 2021

Podcast Episode

🎙 METT Episode #26 - Featuring Katie Wardrobe

Robby Burns

February 23, 2021

Podcast Episode

Technology trainer and speaker, Katie Wardrobe, joins the show to talk about producing technology training and resources for music teachers. (And way more)

Topics include:

Katie's exceptional website: Midnight Music
Free vs. paid software
Teaching facing / student facing software
M1 and Intel Macs
Tools Katie uses to make content
Canva
File Management on iPad
Podcasting
Managing big projects
Our recent favorite tech tips, albums, and apps

Show Notes:

Katie's Home Screen

Robby's Homescreen

App of the Week:
Robby - CalZones
Katie - DaVinci Resolve

Album of the Week:
Robby - Tye Tribbett Apple Music Essentials Playlist
Katie - The Arcadian Wild | Cory Wong & Metropole Orkest

Where to Find Us:
Robby - Twitter | Blog | Book
Katie - Twitter | Website

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

Subscribe to the Blog

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

Robby Burns

December 4, 2020

Original Post

NPR's The 50 Best Albums Of 2020 - an Apple Music Playlist

Robby Burns

December 4, 2020

Original Post

Happy Friday! It's that time of year. Time for me to fulfill my annual tradition of making an Apple Music playlist out of NPR's top 50 albums of the year.

Read about their picks in the linked article below:

The 50 Best Albums Of 2020, Ranked : NPR

At certain moments, 2020 felt like a year that might not ever come to an end. Now that it's mostly in our rear view, can a retrospective give a shape to that swarm of weeks and months? Can we make sense of layer upon layer of fear, anger, frustration, confusion, exhilaration and exhaustion that piled up like soil falling over our heads? Sometimes art breaks through. Better to think of the best music of 2020 as an urgent cacophony of distinct voices rather than a chorus with a single melody. Many voices, with many stories to tell. Here are the 50 best albums of a year unlike any we can remember.

Click here to view my playlist.

Two records were not available on Apple Music but you can hear them and learn more here and here.

Lately NPR has been making a Spotify playlist of the albums. It isn't out yet, but if they do it, I will edit it in to this post.

Robby Burns

August 12, 2020

Original Post

Music Diet, August 2020

Robby Burns

August 12, 2020

Original Post

An assortment of albums I have been listening to this month, so far...

Clear Line | Jacob Garchik

Symphonie Pacifique | Greg Foat

RoundAgain | Joshua Redman, Brad Mehldau, Christian McBride, Brian Blade

Jennifer Higdon Harp Concerto - American Rapture | Yolanda Kondonassis, The Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra & Ward

Some recently listened music in my Apple Music.

Robby Burns

August 11, 2020

Original Post

My Online Teaching Setup (High-Tech Edition)

Robby Burns

August 11, 2020

Original Post

My studio computer and associated hardware.

When school let out in March, I wrote My Very Straightforward and Very Successful Setup for Teaching Virtual Private Lessons. The impetus for this post, and its snarky title, was an overwhelming number of teachers I saw on Facebook fussing about what apps and hardware they should use to teach online when all you really need is a smartphone, FaceTime, and maybe a tripod.

I stand by that post. But there are also reasons to go high-tech. I have had a lot of time this summer to reflect on the coming fall teaching semester. I have been experimenting with software and hardware solutions that are going to make my classes way more engaging.

Zoom

I have been hesitant about Zoom. I still have reservations about their software. Yet, it is hard to resist how customizable their desktop version is. I will be using Google Meet for my public school classes in September, but for my private lessons, I have been taking advantage of Zoom’s detailed features and settings.

For example, it’s easier to manage audio ins and outs. Right from the chat window, I can change if my voice input is going through my Mac's internal microphone or my studio microphone, or if video is coming from my laptop webcam or my external Logitech webcam. This will also be useful for routing audio from apps into the call (we will get to that in a moment).

Zoom allows you to choose the audio/video input from right within the call.

Zoom also allows you to AirPlay the screen of an iOS device to the student as a screen sharing option. This is the main reason I have been experimenting with Zoom. Providing musical feedback is challenging over an internet-connected video call. Speaking slowly helps to convey thoughts accurately, but it helps a lot more when I say “start at measure 32” and the student sees me circle the spot I want them to start in the music, right on their phone.

You can get really detailed by zooming in and out of scores and annotating as little as a single note. If you are wondering, I am doing all of this on a 12.9 inch iPad Pro with Apple Pencil, using the forScore app. A tight feedback loop of “student performance—>teacher feedback—>student adjustment” is so important to good teaching, and a lot of it is lost during online lessons. It helps to get some of it back through the clarity and engagement of annotated sheet music.

Selecting AirPlay as a screen sharing option.

AirPlaying annotated sheet music to the Zoom call using the iPad Pro and forScore app.

As much as I love this, I still think Zoom is pretty student hostile, particularly with the audio settings. Computers already try to normalize audio by taking extreme louds and compressing them. Given that my private lessons are on percussion instruments, this is very bad. Zoom is the worst at it of all the video apps I have used. To make it better, you have to turn on an option in the audio settings called “Use Original Audio” so that the host hears the student’s raw sound, not Zoom’s attempt to even it out. Some of my students report that they have to re-choose this option in the “Meeting Settings” of each new Zoom call.

If this experiment turns out to be worth it for the sheet music streaming, I will deal with it. But this is one of the reasons why I have been using simple apps like FaceTime up until this point.

Sending App Audio Directly to the Call

I have been experimenting with a few apps by Rogue Amoeba that give me more control over how audio is flowing throughout my hardware and software.

Last Spring, I would often play my public school students YouTube videos, concert band recordings from Apple Music, and warm-up play-alongs that were embedded in Keynote slides. I was achieving this by having the sound of these sources come out of my computer speakers and right back into the microphone of my laptop. It actually works. But not for everyone. And not well.

Loopback is an app by Rogue Amoeba that allows you to combine the audio input and output of your various microphones, speakers, and apps, into new single audio devices that can be recognized by the system. I wrote about it here. My current set up includes a new audio device I created with Loopback which combines my audio interface and a bunch of frequently used audio apps into one. The resulting device is called Interface+Apps. If I select it as the input in my computer’s sound settings, then my students hear those apps and any microphone plugged into my audio interface directly. The audio quality of my apps is therefore more pure and direct, and there is no risk of getting an echo or feedback effect from my microphone picking up my computer speaker’s sound.

A Loopback device I created which combines the audio output of many apps with my audio interface into a new, compound device called “Interface+Apps.”

I can select this compound device from my Mac’s Sound settings.

Now I can do the following with a much higher level of quality...

Run a play-along band track and have a private student drum along
Play examples of professional bands for my band class on YouTube
Run Keynote slides that contain beats, tuning drones, and other play-along/reference tracks
and...

Logic Pro X

Logic Pro X is one of my apps routing through to the call via Loopback. I have a MIDI keyboard plugged into my audio interface and a Roland Octopad electronic drum pad that is plugged in as an audio source (though it can be used as a MIDI source too).

The sounds on the Roland Octopad are pretty authentic. I have hi-hat and bass drum foot pedal triggers so I can play it naturally. So in Logic, I start with an audio track that is monitoring the Octopad, and a software instrument track that is set to a piano (or marimba or xylophone, whatever is relevant). This way, I can model drum set or mallet parts for students quickly without leaving my desk. The audio I produce in Logic is routed through Loopback directly into the call. My students say the drum set, in particular, sounds way better in some instances than the quality of real instruments over internet-connected calls. Isn’t that something...

Multiple Camera Angles

Obviously, there is a reason I have previously recommended a set up as simple as a smartphone and a tripod stand. Smartphones are very portable and convenient. And simple smartphone apps like FaceTime and Google Duo make a lot of good default choices about how to handle audio without the fiddly settings some of the more established “voice conference” platforms are known for.

Furthermore, I can’t pick up my desk and move it to my timpani or marimba if I need to model something. So I have begun experimenting with multiple camera angles. I bought a webcam back in March (it finally just shipped). I can use this as a secondary camera to my laptop’s camera (Command+Shift+N in Zoom to change cameras).

Alternatively, I can share my iPhone screen via AirPlay and turn on the camera app. Now I can get up from my desk and go wherever I need to. The student sees me wherever I go. This option is sometimes laggy.

Alternatively, I can log in to the call separately on the iPhone and Mac. This way, there are two instances of me, and if I need to, I can mute the studio desk microphone, and use the phone microphone so that students can hear me wherever I go. I like this option the best because it has the added benefit of showing me what meeting participants see in Zoom.

Logging in to the Zoom call on the Mac and iPhone gives me two different camera angles.

SoundSource

This process works well once it is set up. But it does take some fiddling around with audio ins and outs to get it right. SoundSource is another app by Rogue Amoeba that takes some of the fiddly-ness out of the equation. It replaces the sound options in your Mac’s menubar, offering your more control and more ease at the same time.

This app saved me from digging into the audio settings of my computer numerous times. In addition to putting audio device selection at a more surface level, it also lets you control the individual volume level of each app, apply audio effects to your apps, and more. One thing I do with it regularly is turn down the volume of just the Zoom app when my students play xylophone.

Rogue Amoeba's apps will cost you, but they are worth it for those who want more audio control on the Mac. Make sure you take advantage of their educator discount.

EDIT: My teaching set up now includes the use of OBS and an Elago Stream Deck. Read more here.

Conclusion

I went a little overboard here. If this is overwhelming to you, don't get the idea that you need to do it all. Anyone of these tweaks will advance your setup and teaching.

This post is not specific about the hardware I use. If you care about the brands and models of my gear, check out My Favorite Technology to read more about the specific audio equipment in my setup.

Robby Burns

December 31, 2019

Original Post

NPR Best Albums 2019 - Apple Music and Spotify Playlists

Robby Burns

December 31, 2019

Original Post

Things have been quiet on the blog lately. My wife and I bought a new house in late October and are expecting our first child any day now. Once I can find some time again, I have some very exciting work I am looking forward to here.

In the meantime I wanted to squeeze in a few annual posts I usually do around this time.

NPR Music Best Albums of 2019

I love compiling this list every year. I usually publish it earlier, and have a lot more to say about it. I will be shorter this year.

NPR Music Best Albums of 2019 - Apple Music

NPR Music Best Albums of 2019 - Spotify (I did not compile this one)

So far, my favorites off the list include IGOR, Diatom Ribbons, and Caroline Shaw: Orange (which I already knew).

Off last year's list my favorites have turned out to be Johann Sebastian Bach, The Other Side of Air, Origami Harvest, Vibras, re:member, soli, Heaven and Earth, and Dirty Computer.

I hope these albums help your spring forward into the new year with some new tunes! Happy Holidays!

Robby Burns

December 29, 2018

Original Post

Favorites of 2018 - Albums

Robby Burns

December 29, 2018

Original Post

These posts will never happen if I don’t make it fuss free. So here is it! With little introduction or fanfare, the ‘stuff’ that made up my year. My favorite albums, live shows, apps, and ‘things’ of 2018.

First up, albums!

Favorite Albums of 2018

Johann Sebastian Bach - Vinkingur Ólafsson

Ólafsson breathes new life into the essentials.

Time - Louis Cole

What a way to close the summer! Addictive, savvy, electro pop from a master technician (both instrumentally and as a producer.)

All Ashore - Punch Brothers

For reasons that will be detailed in a Favorite Live Music of 2018 post, this album will forever be associated with an amazing summer of travel with my wife, including seeing Punch Brothers debut this album in its entirety at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival. This is an album made for the political landscape of our current time but that can be enjoyed for the beauty of its timbre, texture, and harmony alone.

Hawktail - Unless

My favorite bluegrass album in a while and my favorite bluegrass band discovery of the year. We have seen these guys a few times live this year and appreciate the relationships we have developed with the band members. If I were doing a favorite songs of 2018, the title track ‘Unless’ would be on it.

Book of Travelers - Gabriele Kahane

Around the time of the 2016 election, Gabriele Kahane took a trip all over the country by train on a search for empathy. This album features the songs inspired by this journey.

Heaven and Earth - Kamasi Washington

It would be easy to characterize this album as excessive but I see it differently. Even though many of the tracks have a similar contour, each one of them is its own epic. In combination, I am never exhausted by the result as I might expect to be, but instead rightly satisfied.

EP - The Fearless Flyers

Members of Vulpeck team up with Nate Smith on drums to create the “too-short-est” record I have ever heard. The dry texture of all three varieties of electric guitar on this record leave nothing to be desired. And Nate Smith can do more with a snare drum, bass drum, and hi hat than most drummers can do with a nine piece kit and plethora of cymbals.

Kids See Ghosts - Kanye West and Kid Cudi

I’d like to file this one under “listen to this if you don’t think hip hop is interesting.”

Dirty Computer - Janelle Monáe

If anyone wanted to argue that this is the most profound (and catchy) album of the year, I would hand it to them immediately.

See You Around - I’m With Her

Try to not enjoy listening to these sounds, even if you don’t like folk music.

Sampha - Process

Cerebral, groove centered, and colorful. One of my favorites of the favorites.

Support Music Ed Tech Talk

Show Notes:

Show Notes:

Katie's Home Screen

Robby's Homescreen

Subscribe to Music Ed Tech Talk:

Zoom

Sending App Audio Directly to the Call

Logic Pro X

Multiple Camera Angles

SoundSource

Conclusion

NPR Music Best Albums of 2019

Favorite Albums of 2018

Johann Sebastian Bach - Vinkingur Ólafsson

Time - Louis Cole

All Ashore - Punch Brothers

Hawktail - Unless

Book of Travelers - Gabriele Kahane

Heaven and Earth - Kamasi Washington

EP - The Fearless Flyers

Kids See Ghosts - Kanye West and Kid Cudi

Dirty Computer - Janelle Monáe

See You Around - I’m With Her

Sampha - Process