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

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.

FREE: Remington Exercise Play-Along Tracks - Holiday Edition

If you have not already checked out my Scale Exercise Play-Along Tracks, do it now! Everything is currently 10 dollars off on my store if you use code THANKFUL at checkout. This puts them at only $5! Sale ends tomorrow.

And if you are itching to add some holiday cheer to your rehearsal warmups, you can download my Holiday Edition of the Remington play-alongs from that collection here. These are free of charge.

What makes them a “Holiday Edition?” Sleighbells, of course. And that half-diminished 7 chord everyone thinks sounds “Christmassy.” Sample below.

New Macs announced yesterday, new Mac operating system shipping tomorrow

Apple's "One More "Thing Event

Apple announced three new Macs yesterday that will use their new M1 chip. This will allow unprecedented increases in power, speed, and battery life. It will also allow iOS apps to run on them natively.

I have shared some real quick impressions below. If you want to hear more about this transition, Will Kuhn is on the upcoming episode of the podcast to talk about his impressions, amongst other topics in technology and music education. That episode should drop over the weekend.

Quick thoughts

• Apple announced a new MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13", and Mac mini. Of these three, the Air and Mac mini are particularly tempting to me. They maintain similar prices (way cheaper in the case of the mini), and dramatically improve performance, battery life, speed, and allow for using iOS apps. If you need a Mac, and you don't need the most powerful one on the market, I couldn't recommend either of these more. Of course, it is always safe to wait for reviews, but I anticipate that there won't be any significant deal breakers outside of potential software compatibility.
• There are a lot of things Apple could do with the M1 chip down the road. Add FaceID, a cellular chip, a touchscreen, and maybe even a new design. Apple decided not to do these things yet and keep the designs pretty much like the last generation. I think this sends the message to the general public that this is not some new, experimental thing, but instead, the same old Mac you know and love. Just way better.
• I was surprised not to see more iOS apps demonstrated. Apple showed a few iOS apps (like the game Among Us and HBO Max) running on one of the new Macs. Before the event, I have noted that it is weird that the TV app will show my recently watched HBO shows, but I can't play them on an intel Mac like I can on iOS or tvOS, which have the HBO app. This will be an obvious improvement. But where is Hulu? Netflix? Surely Apple chooses who they feature on stage strategically. Still, I would have expected them to do more bragging if they were anticipating a ton of extremely popular apps to launch on day one. Fingers crossed for a lot of new options in the Mac App Store early on.
• No AirTags, over the ear headphones, or Apple TV. I was personally curious about these devices, particularly the rumored studio headphones, but maybe they will come later.

macOS 11 - Big Sur

The new Mac operating system, Big Sur, is coming out tomorrow. This update is dramatic in numerous respects. You will immediately notice a fresh coat of paint. The user interface and app icons will feel a lot more like they do on iOS.

iPad Apps on the Mac

I am excited because iOS app developers I care about are finally starting to announce Catalyst apps in volume. Catalyst is Apple's technology that allows developers to easily turn their iPad apps into Mac apps. There have been relatively few good examples of this over the past year. GoodNotes 5, Streaks, Twitter, and Home, are a few of the ones I use regularly, but the list isn't long.

Instapaper has a Mac app as of today (yay), and forScore is launching one tomorrow. I expect to see a lot more in the coming weeks. It seems like changes to this new OS have finally provided developers the tools they need to make their iPad apps "good enough" to ship on the Mac.

Will I Install It On Day One?

While I usually wait to install releases like this, forScore will be enough of a productivity boost for my Mac workflow that I will be reckless and install it tomorrow, most likely. This will put my online teaching software setup at risk, but I think it is worth it. I am tired of having a beautifully curated music library on the iPad and not on my most powerful machine. Until forScore ships iCloud syncing, I plan to move my "true" sheet music library to the Mac version.

It’s official: forScore will be coming to the Mac this Thursday, Nov. 12th! https://t.co/vLEEMnnKwh

— forScore App (@forscoreapp) November 10, 2020

Music Software Compatability

If you depend on any creative professional music software, audio interfaces, or other apps you aren't sure will be compatible with Big Sur, don't be like me. Wait! I have a fallback Mac mini I can use if things get ugly.

If you are wondering what score editing software is compatible with, fortunately, Scoring Notes has already got the scoop. Read their article below.

Music notation software, macOS Big Sur, and Apple Silicon M1 Macs:

As far as Sibelius, Finale, Dorico, MuseScore, and Notion, are concerned: Broadly speaking, Big Sur does not appear to affect these applications much one way or the other. We don't expect users already working on macOS Catalina to be negatively or positively affected by Big Sur when working with these applications — and whenever a new OS is involved, status quo is very welcome news indeed.

App of the Week: Neural Mix Pro

I have been testing out a Mac App called Neural Mix Pro, made by the people who make the popular DJay App for macOS and iOS.

It promises to take songs in your music library and hard drive and independently isolate vocals, drums, and other accompaniment so that they can be separated and mixed independently.

It works. I haven't played with it enough to know the breadth of its capability, but I tested the following songs, and they worked enough that I think I would use this tool for future music projects and teaching resources.

• Blues for Time: a fusion song in a drum set method book I assign often. I already had a drum-less version of the track, but the one I could make in Neural Mix Pro was satisfactory. There are some artifacts when you filter out instruments, but that was to be expected. No vocals on this track, but drums and other accompaniment separated correctly.
• Material Girl, Madonna: The vocals and electronic drums are so heavy in this track that isolating just the accompaniment instruments resulted in the correct instruments but not with an EQ that I would use for anything professionally. The vocals and drums sounded ok when separated.
• Jesus Walks, Kanye West: very satisfactory separation of drums, accompaniment, vocals. The backup vocals in the intro are tied to the vocal track, however. No way to separate that. With Neural Mix, you can export just one of the three tracks and apply a target key or tempo to change to it. I exported this tune to an even 80 bpm (it was around 78.x bpm, to begin with) into Logic Pro and has some fun toying around with adding my own improvisations using software instruments. I can see how this could be a useful tool for DJs, music producers, and music educators alike.

Here is a video of my quick demo. I made this on a computer with limited access to my music library and no real goal in mind other than to play around. Let me know if there is something you think I should test in the app.

I can see this app being useful in the music classroom for a few reasons. In my general music class, where we use Soundtrap to produce music, I could giving students a vocal track for a pop song and having them remix it. The results in Neural Mix are, by far, good enough for student use, and I imagine my students having a blast with this.

I could also use this in private lessons by taking songs my students drum along to and making "Minus One" recordings out of them that don't any longer have the drums. Alternatively, I could make them a drum-only version of a song to study the details more closely.

This would be more useful you could separate other instruments than just drums. Taking an instrumentalist out of a jazz record to create a track to improvise over is one of a handful of possibilities that immediately popped into my head. Perhaps these features are in store for a future update. Or maybe this app will remain geared towards pop music, DJs, and music producers. Either way, I can see myself using it on my never-ending quest to make fun play-along tracks for the band to play along to.

Apple Silicon, Macs in Education, and App-Centric Learning

Apple Silicon Macs are likely going to be announced at their upcoming event this Tuesday, November 10th.

Bradley Chambers is incredibly knowledgeable about Apple's relationship with education and he makes some great points in the post below about how this transition could influence the Mac in education.

Making the Grade: What will Apple Silicon mean for Apple's education strategy? - 9to5Mac:

I believe that Apple will have untold flexibility in what kind of laptops they can produce for schools now. Is it possible to build an 11″ MacBook based on Apple Silicon that is $799 when purchased in bulk but still runs extremely fast? I believe so. It might not be in the first year or two of Apple Silicon’s lifespan that we see it, but in a few years, it’s certainly possible that Apple will have reduced the cost on the A14 to put it in a K–12 focused laptop in the future.

I could be way off base on my predictions. Still, I believe that Apple Silicon will unlock a lot of potential in K–12 to produce lower-cost laptops that will run circles around much higher priced laptops running Intel chips. I’d love to see an 11″ Apple Silicon laptop aimed directly at students that could be used for many years.

I really do hope that Apple tries to be creative with the Mac in education again. Still, I fear that anything they do is too little, too late. Apple has has not been aggressive in education. They tend to make huge leaps in certain areas of their business and then let them settle for a long time, sometimes years. This approach works for developing consumer software like note-taking apps, but it is not aggressive enough to compete with Chromebooks and cloud-based education software. I think back to Apple’s education event a few years back where they positioned the iPad as their future in schools and released a bunch of APIs that iOS app developers could use to link into their Classroom app. Years later, what has come of any of that? If you are using iPads in education, and you use Apple Classroom in combination with third party apps, I would love to hear from you!

Chromebooks and web apps have taken off. And a lot of these web apps can talk to each other. For example, third parties like Flipgrid and Noteflight can integrate with LMS software like Blackboard and Canvas. But these connections are often full of frustrating bugs. On top of this, the quality of a lot of this software in ed tech is already so poor. I wouldn't exactly call it a race to the bottom, because most developers are doing their best with the resources they have, but I like to dream about an alternate reality where Apple's vision for an "app-centric" model were the norm instead of the "web-centric" model we have now.

Of course, web software is cheaper and cross-platform. So it makes sense that it has caught on for being most equitable. But in a world where Apple had kept their prices more competitive, maybe school districts would have been more willing to buy students 1:1 Apple products, especially when schools jumped online in March.

App of the Week: Reeder 5

The Reeder widget can serve up articles from blogs I subscribe to or that I have set aside to read later (or both using a stack of widgets).

On episode 18 of Music Ed Tech Talk, Reeder 5 was my App of the Week.

It's a really good app and I thought it was worth linking to the review from MacStories if you want to learn more.

Reeder 5 Review: Read Later Tagging, iCloud Sync, and Design Refinements - MacStories:

Last year we named RSS client Reeder 4 the Best App Update as part of the MacStories Selects awards for a good reason. Reeder has been one of the best-designed RSS apps available for a very long time. With the release of version 4, developer Silvio Rizzi rebuilt the app on a modern foundation from the ground up. Roughly one year later, version 5 is out as a brand new app that takes what Rizzi began last year and extends it further with a host of excellent new features and design refinements.

I don't trust social media to show me what I want. If I like a blog, a Twitter account, or an email newsletter, I subscribe to it through Feedbin, and then read my Feedbin articles through Reeder 5. I also log into my Instapaper account through Reeder 5 and clip articles I want to read later to it with a speedy swipe-left.

On page two of my home screen, I have this medium sized widget at the bottom that rotates between different news sources: Apple News, Apollo, Feedbin, and Instapaper, the later of the two using the Reeder 5 widget. It's a great way to stay on top of the news that's important to me.

Using Drafts and TextExpander to Organize Lesson Notes

I am moving more of my text notes to Drafts these days. You can read about how I use Drafts here. Drafts is a note-taking app where most of my text typing starts. When I am ready to act upon my text, the actions on the right side of the screen allow me to send it off to messages, emails, tasks, notes, social media, and more.

Generally, I use Drafts as a text-inbox, where I eventually process all of my text ideas and send them to other apps that are better suited for them. But lately, I wonder why I need to take the extra step of sending a draft to another app when Drafts is perfectly suited for organizing and searching text.

Let's take Lesson Notes, for example. When I teach a sectional, large ensemble, or private lesson, I like to take notes on what we played and what I assigned. Usually, I would type these in Drafts and then send the finished text to Apple Notes. But lately, I am just keeping it in Drafts and archiving it so that it doesn't clutter up the inbox area. Everything is in plaintext so searching my entire 7,000 draft library is way faster than searching Apple Notes. Plus, it reduces the amount of time I ever even need to open Apple Notes by 90 percent.

I add the tag "sectionals" to a draft where I have taken sectional notes, and I have a custom workspace that allows me to see just the drafts with that tag.

Additionally, tagging them "badge" makes it so that the draft doesn't contribute to the number on the red badge of the Drafts icon. I use the badge only to inform me of drafts that need to be processed to another app.

I write most of my drafts in Markdown, which means I use "#" symbols to note levels of the heading, "**" to indicate things I want bold, etc... If you want to read more about how I use Markdown, read this post. Drafts and common web editing tools like WordPress (and even Canvas) can turn this Markdown into HTML. I only use Markdown for my sectional notes to show bullet-pointed lists and first/second-level headings. Drafts does some light formatting to help me better see this information by, for example, highlighting the headings green.

It gets tedious to retype this template for every class, so I have TextExpander snippets to do it for me. Read about how I am using TextExpander here.

In the case of the snippet below, I type "sectionalnotes" into the body of the draft and then TextExpander prompts me for the ensemble and sectional name and then automatically fills in that data, with my fill-ins and the current date.

Using an action called Current UUID, I can copy a link to a draft to my clipboard and paste it in to the calendar event for whatever class, lesson, or sectional it is related to. That way, I can easily refer to it by date, using the visually friendly interface of a calendar app.

Sponsor Music Ed Talk Talk!

Do you have a product, app, or service that you would like to promote?

I am now offering sponsorships for the blog and podcast! A sponsorship includes…

• An ad pinned to the sidebar of this blog (my thanks to this month’s sponsor, Flat for Education!)

• A blog post about your product in my feed. You can provide the copy. If you wish, I can test your product and add some of my own experiences to the post.

• An ad read on one episode of my podcast. Again, you provide the copy, but it is read conversationally in the middle of my show, not like a commercial. I speak to my own experiences if I have them.

I am open to all kinds of sponsorships. The audience of the blog and podcast are musicians and educators, often active music teachers, who are generally tech-savvy. Many of them use multiple computing devices, aren’t afraid to try new tech, and are looking for practical ways to engage their students musically.

Naturally, software that enhances the creative and productive lives of musicians and teachers is a good fit but I am open to sponsorships of a much wider variety than just that. Music stores, colleges, fundraisers, books, you name it!

If you want to be a sponsor, or if you want more details, choose Contact in the navigation bar of this site and leave me a message!

And if you don’t have a reason to sponsor the site in this way, but you want to support my continued hosting costs and motivation to keep producing content, check out my Buy Me a Coffee page. I appreciate any and all support!

Take Advantage of IFTTT Discounted Price Until October 31

In an upcoming episode of my podcast, Frank Buck and I talk a bit about automation. In that episode we reference a great service called If This Than That. I have been using it for years and though the service is free, they recently announced a Pro Version with a “choose your own price” subscription model.

You can choose a price as low as $1.99 a month until October 31. Since the podcast episode isn’t dropping until later in the week, I thought I would get this news out there now.

This is an extremely useful service that has been a part of my productivity workflow for years. IFTTT allows you to string together different apps and services to create automations, or, “Applets.” Some examples might include:

• If I save a YouTube video to watch later, add a task to remind me to watch it

• If I like a Tweet, save the attached article to a read it later list

• If I am tagged in an Instagram photo, save it to my Dropbox

• If I do an item on my to do list, log it in a row of a Google Sheet

• If I pin something on Pinterest, share it to Facebook

The possibilities are limitless. The pro version adds a ton of features, for example:

• Multi-step Applets

• Queries and conditional logic

• Multiple actions

• Faster Applet execution

  ... and beyond.

IFTTT is a great tool and I strongly recommend you check our the new pro features before the end of this month!

Adobe Illustrator Comes to the iPad

From MacStories…

Adobe MAX Kicks Off with Illustrator for iPad, Photoshop, Lightroom, and Fresco Updates for iPad, Plus the Addition of Fresco for iPhone - MacStories

This year the announcements at MAX are no different. I’ve tried all of the apps discussed below that Adobe is releasing or updating for the iPad and iPhone this year to one degree or another, including spending the past few weeks using the beta version of Adobe’s latest pro iPad app, Illustrator. My artistic skills don’t do Illustrator justice, but from what I’ve seen from my testing the past few weeks and demos by Adobe, Illustrator is a remarkably powerful vector drawing app that takes a truly innovative approach to the app that should still be familiar to desktop users, but is designed first and foremost around touch interactions. Adobe has also released Fresco for the iPhone and some substantial new features to both Photoshop and Lightroom.

One more “pro” app from the creative industry finally comes to the iPad. I am enthusiastic about this though I have not used Illustrator in years. I am tempted to say that Adobe’s efforts on iPad (Photoshop came out last year) are too little too late, but the reality is, these apps are just not for people like me in most cases. If you are a professional using this software to get your work done, it is worth Adobe’s subscription. If you work for a large company doing design, I imagine the cost is even covered for you.

Unless you are really comfortable with Illustrator, I don’t feel like I can recommend this app for designing things. I started learning Affinity Designer this past summer which is an amazing competitor to both the Mac and iOS versions of Illustrator. It is easier to use and more “Apple-like” in many ways. If you need the power of an app like this, I recommend checking out Affinity Designer. It is very frequently on sale for prices as low as 30 dollars.

Another program I use for a lot of my design is OmniGraffle which is by the OmniGroup, the same people who create OmniFocus. It feels as close to using one of the iWork apps as I have seen for a vector-based design app. Its simplicity has vastly sped up my work making graphics for my website/podcast, school music program, seating charts, and more.