The Sonos Approach

As an advocate for both high quality speakers and home automation, the relationship between the Amazon Echo and the Sonos home stereo is exciting to me. Ever since the announcement of their future integration, I have wondered: how specifically will I be able to command my Sonos speakers? Will the Amazon Echo speaker itself be able to play music from my Sonos library? Will music accessible on my Sonos (Amazon Prime for example) be able to be triggered on the Sonos? Will I be able to trigger anything from my Sonos library from the Echo, even if the Echo doesn’t have that information stored within it?

These questions plague me. In the meantime, it is great to see that Sonos is thinking about deep integration and the long term. Check out this article about it:

http://www.theverge.com/2017/2/14/14596904/sonos-ceo-alexa-smart-home-outdoor-speakers-patrick-spence-interview

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!

9 Gateway Pieces to Contemporary Music for Pop Lovers

This list is pretty esoteric but I love it. I don't think the average pop listener has Flying Lotus on rotation, nor would Beat Furrer's Spur be a piece I would use to introduce contemporary classical idioms to the uninitiated. But maybe most people who listen to some of the "pop" on this list are acquainted with some of the more standard classical rep, so perhaps the list is spot on after all. My ponderings aside, everything in here is really exceptional.

9 Gateway Pieces to Contemporary Music for Pop Lovers | heather roche:

He’s helped me to create a list of nine comparisons between contemporary classical music and pop, intended for curious pop music listeners, in which each counterpart piece has some artistic commonality with the other. While this blog normally hosts entries intended for the initiated contemporary classical music listener (and, for the most part, the composer), this post has the adventurous pop music listener in mind, the suggestions aiming to be portals to previously unencountered music.

I’ve tried to pick a mix of work: young people who are active and changing the new music landscape, an older generation at the height of their power, two who would be with us working still had they not died tragically young, and plenty of brilliant women. And I also provided a “What’s next” for each suggestion: I’m mostly freestyling here in my associations, but I hope they’re of interest. There are a lot of different avenues that contemporary classical music has gone down, so if one sub-genre doesn’t appeal to you, all is not lost. You might notice a lack of minimalist composers here: minimalism (Reich, Glass, Nyman, etc.) is fairly omnipresent these days; I wanted to expose some of the other sub-genres available to curious listeners.

Adventurous indeed.

Komp, music handwriting app for iPad, is released

I forgot to post this when it happened. Komp, a new musical handwriting app for iOS, was released in late April. Click here to download.

The Scoring Notes blog has a great review of it (read here). I have not spent nearly enough time with the app to review it fairly, but it did leave a very gut first impression on me.

The pricing model is subscription based (five dollars a month, fifty dollars a year). As someone who has embraced a number of subscription priced apps (Dropbox, Evernote, Microsoft Office, etc.) this isn't a bad thing. Whether you like it or not, this is the direction the industry is going. Komp is thinking forward with this model.

Komp is way prettier than most score apps out there, and this matters! Beautiful interfaces and intuitive designs have been made standard on iOS, and it is great to see professional music software by third parties coding with this priority in mind. Unfortunately, I do not find all of Komp's user interface very intuitive. It isn't so bad once you figure it out. I do wish the score setup screen would adhere better to some of the iOS interface standards for file management and new document creation. And I wish the introduction video did a better job showing where the finger/pencil are clicking and tapping. I saw what was happening on the screen, but not always exactly what I was supposed to tap to get there.

Scoring Notes also does a great job explaining how Komp interprets Appel Pencil input. In short, it interprets as you write instead of after you have completed a measure. This leads to some freedoms as well as some frustrations, all of which you can read in their review. In the short time I have used Komp, I still feel like I am fighting with it rather than writing freely and letting the software do it's work. Even though it is in some respects better looking and more powerful than competitors like NotateMe and MusicJot, I am not sure it has a place in my workflow yet. There were still too many mistakes in the processing of my pencil strokes that I would just rather write with real pencil and paper at first, and then later inputting into a piece of software like Sibelius or Dorico.

In other words, I am not sure Komp is a real revolution in handwriting notation on a tablet yet. But it is only a 1.0, and time will tell if this is a viable input method for composers.

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. 

My WWDC 2017 Wish List

Apple's World Wide Developer Conference kicks off with a keynote on June 5th. This keynote is where Apple announces most of the major software features to expect on their devices the following fall. I figured it would be fun to round up all of the software features I want to see most on each of their platforms. I posed this list to reddit and asked the r/apple community what they wanted to see implemented. Click here to view the thread.

Here is the list I proposed:

macOS

• News app to mirror the one on iOS
• improvements to pro apps (Final Cut Pro X and Logic Pro X) and additions to the Photos app
• splitting iTunes up into separate apps like what is on iOS: separate app for Music, TV, Podcasts, and iTunes Store

iOS

• default apps (won't happen)
• serious overhaul of iPad productivity (better file system, better home screen, drag and drop, better multitasking, more control over audio ins and outs)

tvOS

• PiP
• Ability to watch TV content from two apps at once
• ability to command with Siri without the Remote app (for example, I want to say to my phone, “hey Siri watch Game of Thrones,” and have it turn on the TV, launch the HBO app and start the most recent episode)
• ability to sync all Apple TVs in the house so that they show the same video at once (for parties...also, this won't happen)

watchOS

• smart contexts: ability to change Watch face, complications, and notifications based on sensitivity to time and location
• better audio controls (easier to access Now Playing screen, complications to play and pause audio, ability to scroll the crown for volume and use hardware buttons for control whenever audio has recently been playing)

General

• Siri improvements (more reliable, faster, more open to third party apps, better integration with tvOS, local dictation and basic commands
• AirPods with always listening Siri
• improvements to iCloud Drive (shared folders, files, and URLs)

Here are some of my favorite features that reddit users replied with:

• Multiple iOS user logins
• Hey Siri on Mac
• custom watch faces
• open CarPlay up to more developers (pasrticular third party maps apps and messenging apps)
• iOS dark mode
• Workflow integration
• Open up NFC to third party apps
• Apple Pay your friends and family over iMessage
• Apple Music continuity

Thelonius Monk's Advice

Thelonius Monk's Advice:

The following fantastic list of advice comes courtesy of legendary jazz pianist Thelonious Monk, a musical genius who died exactly 30 years ago, on February 17th of 1982. The list was transcribed by saxophonist Steve Lacy in 1960.

Amongst my favorites on the list:

• Stop playing all those weird notes, play the melody!
• Don’t play everything (or all the time); let some things go by. Some music just imagined. What you don’t play can be more important than what you do.
• A note can be as small as a pin or as big as the world, it depends on your imagination.

SoundSource - The Sound Control That Should Be Built into macOS

YES! I have been waiting for something like this for years. Leave it to Rogue Amoeba to create another Mac utility that fulfills a task that should come standard on the macOS.

SoundSource lives in the menu bar of your Mac and gives you fine control over the inputs and outputs of your audio. Given that I am an audio professional, I am always plugging my computer in and out of various different speakers, microphones, and audio interfaces. SoundSource offers me a convenient menu for managing these, one click away at all times.

Check it out here.

MMEA 2017 Session Notes

Here are the session notes for the presentation, Digital Organization Tips for Music Teachers:  MMEA 2017 - Robby Burns Session Notes

My most used app in the music classroom, Tonal Energy, gets a huge update!

My no. 1 most used music app in the classroom[^1], Tonal Energy, gets a huge update today.

The app brings support for iOS 10 (finally), higher screen resolution on plus sized iPhones (finally!), and better matches the design language Apple introduced with iOS 7 (FINALLY!).

And to top it off, it has an Apple Watch app. I have yet to use an Apple Watch app I love for a metronome[^2] so I will have to report back if this one is any good.

What I have explained above are primarily cosmetic. This upgrade is also jammed full of new features. It will take me some time to explore them all, but in the meantime, see the images below for some of the highlights, mentioned on the app's App Store page.

Expect a blog post in the coming days with more thoughts on the overall experience of using this app.

TonalEnergy Chromatic Tuner and Metronome by Sonosaurus LLC

Download link: https://appsto.re/us/kYOQD.i

[^1]: Ok, it may be tied with forScore.

[^2]: tacet is an alright metronome app but is the only one that comes close to being useful in my opinion.