🔗 Rhiannon Giddens to Lead Silkroad's Musical Explorations (The New York Times)

From the New York Times...

Rhiannon Giddens to Lead Silkroad’s Musical Explorations - The New York Times:

Trained as an opera singer, Rhiannon Giddens was a founding member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, the acclaimed folk group. With the Chocolate Drops and as a solo artist, a virtuoso fiddler and banjo player with a soulful voice, she has delved into African-American and old-time traditions. She won a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2017 and wrote an opera based on the autobiography of Omar Ibn Said, a Muslim man from Africa who was enslaved in South Carolina. (Its planned premiere has been delayed until next year by the coronavirus pandemic.)

Now she will have a new, global curatorial canvas for her genre-skipping ideas. On Tuesday, Silkroad, the cross-cultural music organization created by Yo-Yo Ma in 1998, announced that Ms. Giddens would be its next artistic director.

Awesome news! If you haven't heard Rhiannon Gidden's music, you owe it to yourself. Her music has a wide appeal, and regardless of your musical tastes, I think you will find something to love about it.

Due app gets an Update for the Mac

Due is an indispensable app that I depend on daily on both iOS, the Apple Watch, and the Mac. There are three things that immediately come to mind when I think about why I like this app over the basic Reminders app.

1. Its design is beautiful, intelligent, and easy to read.
2. Its natural language parsing is a breeze... "remind me to help with lunch duty at 11:27 am" adds a reminder with the time just as I type it.
3. The swipe down gesture to add a new task is very intuitive.
4. By far, most important: you can set the notifications to keep pinging you until you check the task as done. You can even customize the amount of time it snoozes when you tap the snooze button.

I don't use this app to manage big projects. For that, I use OmniFocus. But for tasks that have to be acted on in a very specific moment, Due is the tool for the job.

It just got a major Mac update. Most of the changes are design focused, which I can appreciate because the Mac app, while it functioned, was starting to look pretty out of date. If you want to read more of the specifics, I recommend the MacStories article linked below.

Due for Mac Modernized with New Design and Features:

A full-fledged task manager is terrific for many projects, but if you dump your entire life into one, it can quickly become a cluttered mess. At the same time, if you’re focused on a big project, it’s easy to let everything that’s not in your task manager slip through the cracks. One strategy for attacking the problem that has worked well for me is using a separate, lightweight app for tasks like remembering to take out the garbage, pick up medicine at the pharmacy, or publish an article when an embargo lifts.

In the past, I’ve used Due on the iPhone and iPad for these sorts of tasks. There has been a Mac version of Due for years too, but it hadn’t been updated in about two years and was showing its age. However, with today’s update, Due for Mac joins the iOS version with a fully-modern design and slate of new features, putting it on par with the outstanding iOS version, which I’ve covered in the past.

Panel Discussion: "Teaching Music Online During the Pandemic" this Wednesday, August 5, 2020

I am taking part in a Panel Discussion called "Teaching Music Online During the Pandemic" this Wednesday, August 5th. It is taking place on the Music Teachers Facebook Group at 8 pm through Zoom.

I will specifically be contributing ideas about practical instruction for performing ensembles. I am planning to discuss everything from large group rehearsal to break-out chamber ensembles, to music scanning apps, and software for assessing student performance.

Some great minds are involved. Here is a description of the panel from the Facebook Event:

Join us for a free online panel discussion with several of your Music Teacher Administrators and Moderators and special guests as we discuss the tools, techniques, and resources to move your music ensembles and music classrooms totally online or to a blended learning hybrid. Panelists include Jim Frankel, CEO of Music First; Katie Wardrobe, Director, Midnight Music Technology Training; Ron Kearns, retired HS band teacher; Tom West Blended Learning Instrumental Music teacher; Robby Burns, MS band teacher; Richard McCready, HS guitar teacher & music ministry; Tiffany Walker, MS band teacher; Krystal Williams, HS band teacher.

If you are interested, you can join the group here. Note: You will not be admitted into the group if you do not answer the questions.

Should You Keep Dropbox?

One of the reasons I continue using Apple products is that they work well together. The better the features work across devices, the less often users need third party software to get things done.

Now that iCloud Drive supports the sharing of files and folders, a lot of vocal Mac and iOS users have debated if they can finally let go of Dropbox.

Productivity master, David Sparks, had some things to say about it on his blog this week:

I’m Keeping Dropbox — MacSparky

All that said, Dropbox still has many features that sure would be nice in iCloud, like a much better implementation of version history and deletion recovery. I was hoping we would get some more functionality for iCloud Drive this year at WWDC, but we didn’t. I was hoping I could throw Dropbox overboard. One less service and one less thing to pay for sure sounded nice.

For me, the major hole in iCloud Drive is that I cannot control what lives on my hard drive and what stays in the cloud. Both Dropbox and iCloud have a feature where they will smartly try to make this decision for you, uploading files you haven't touched in months to the cloud so that they don't take up hard drive space. 

Sometimes I need the control to be able to tell a service to keep a folder or a file permanently downloaded, no matter what. And iCloud Drive still can't do this task.

iCloud folder and file sharing are reliable in my use, but setting up the share is far less intuitive than Dropbox, which presents its options to you with clear iconography when you right-click on a folder or file in the Finder.

Why Apple can't get right what Dropbox figured out over ten years ago still confuses me. Hopefully they will tweak it and make it better.

I am fortunate that my free Dropbox account is large enough that I don't need to pay. iCloud remains my primary storage solution but I keep Dropbox around for miscellaneous purposes, including sharing with others who don't use iCloud.

If you want to use Dropbox on a Mac, but avoid installing it, I recommend the app Transmit. While the app is marketed as an FTP client, it can also act as a Google Drive or Dropbox client, allowing you to upload, download, copy, and share files, using a native macOS experience, and without allowing Dropbox to run in the background.

New restructuring here on the blog and podcast

Until last Sunmer, I hosted the Music Ed Tech Talk podcast here on SquareSpace, as a separate blog page from this one. In August, I moved my podcast to Libsyn but continued to cross post the episodes to that SquareSpace blog so that episodes would have a nice place on the web that looked like it was in a consistent style with the rest of my website.

Having two SquareSpace blogs here seemed redundant. So I have combined the podcast with this blog and now they are both called Music Ed Tech Talk. It will make no difference to readers and listeners. Everything is just under the same hood. Subscribers to the blog will get blog posts each time a publish a podcast episode, containing the show notes and a web player to listen from the web. Listeners to the show can continue to use the same feed to get just the episodes in their podcast player of choice.

If you click Blog in the navigation of my website, or type musicedtechtalk.com, it willl take you here, where you can see all posts and episodes. If you click podcasts in the nav bar, and select Music Ed Tech Talk, it will no longer take you to the old, secondary, blog I was using for the podcast. Now it will take you to this blog, but with the podcast category filtered, so you only see episodes once you scroll below whatever blog post is featured at the top.

I'm not sure if anyone cares about these details except for me, but it sure does feel good not to be posting all of my new podcast episodes to SquareSpace two times. I am leaving the old podcast blog site up because it still gets search hits on the web, but I have de-linked it from this site.

By the way, if you haven't, you should subscribe to the blog and podcast using the appropriate links in the sidebar. You can now subscribe to these posts in a weekly email!

Routing Audio from Your Apps Directly Into Your Zoom Call (Or Other Voice Chat App) with Loopback

UPDATE: Learn more about Loopback from my interview with CEO Paul Kafasis on my podcast. Listen and subscribe below…

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Loopback is an app that creates custom audio ins and outs for the Mac using the audio of other apps.

Have you been teaching a class in Google Meet or Zoom and wanted to play a song from iTunes for your digital classroom? Or perhaps a YouTube video or any other application with audio?

Sure, you can play it right on your computer and let the audio from your speakers go straight back into the microphone input of your computer. This works ok in my opinion. But it isn't going to produce a pure representation of the audio I am trying to send. And in some cases, it creates issues with echo, delay, or a nasty feedback loop.

So what do you do? Rogue Amoeba makes excellent Mac apps that, for lack of better explanation, hack into the audio system of your Mac. I have written about Audio Hijack here before, their app that allows you to record audio from other applications (and that's just the start of all the powerful things it can do). Rogue Amoeba also makes an excellent utility called Loopback.

What does Loopback do? Think about your computer's audio settings. You have an Input and an Output. The Input is, by default, your computer microphone, and the Output is the speakers. If you connect an audio interface that has higher quality microphone and speakers plugged in, you would need to set the Input and Output to that interface to get the input and out put the be the microphone and speakers, respectively.

Usually my computer microphone is a Device that can be set to the computer’s Input. In the scenario above, Loopback has allowed me to combine the audio from my microphone and the Music app into a new audio Device called “Music+Mic” that can be selected as the input of my Mac or any individual app.

Your Inputs and Outputs can be controlled from the Sound settings of your computer. Some audio apps also let you control how, specifically, they behave. For example, I have manually set up GarageBand and Skype to use my audio interface as the Device I use for input so that whether I am recording for my podcast, or simply catching up with a relative, they hear me through the microphone, no matter what Device my Mac’s audio Output is set to in the System Preferences.

Loopback allows you to create Inputs and Outputs that are accessible to your Mac's Sound settings as well as your apps. In the example above, I have created an Input that combines my Mac's microphone (the usual Input) with the output of the Apple Music app, something I might want to use to play a recording example for my students in a Google Meet.

Selecting my new audio Device from the System Preferences.

Look now as I go to my computer's Sound settings, and I can select this new custom Input to be used across the entire operating system! This way, when I am in a Google Meet, students are hearing both me speaking through the mic and all of the output of the Music app.

Now I can route my band warm up tracks, reference recordings, or any other audio I desire, into my Google Meet classrooms.

🔗 Choir Creator: All-in-One Virtual Ensemble Maker App, Shipping Next Month on iOS

New app for creating virtual ensembles coming next month. Click the link to read more information directly from the developer’s website and sign up to be notified when it is released.

Choir Creator: The All-in-One Virtual Choir Builder:

Choir Creator is the easiest way to organize and produce a virtual choir video. Releasing to the United States and Canada in August 2020 for iPhone and iPad running iOS 12.4 or later.

From the YouTube demo on the developer’s website, it looks like the workflow solves nearly all of the friction of this process. The business model of charging the teacher a considerable (but reasonable) amount of money and nothing to the student is solid.

That said, this process does not leave a lot of room for control. I would like to be able to, for example, turn up the tuba if it isn’t loud enough. I can think of numerous other ways that I would want to exercise more control than the output of this app would allow. That said, there is a strong market for software that makes it this easy. I think it may do well.

It’s iOS only at launch, which is not a surprise, but will limit school systems where students are using Chromebooks.

Edit: I have spoken with the developers of this app. They informed me that Choir Creator will support basic audio editing features at launch, like changing the volume and panning of each track. They said they have more audio editing features to come. Good to know!

🔗 Business Chat Now Available to All Zendesk Customers

From MacRumors:

Apple Business Chat Now Available to All Zendesk Customers:

Apple and Zendesk today made Business Chat generally available for all businesses that use Zendesk Support, over two years since the service first went into beta.

Business chat is a really useful feature that lets you connect with customer support right in the Apple Messages app.

The feature takes email out of the equation and improves the entire user experience to where contacting support feels as simple as texting a friend.

I have used it to get a hold of Apple and Home Depot and it's a dream. By Zendesk integrating it, it will become easy for the numerous large and small companies to take advantage of it. The more widespread this becomes, the less often you will need to search Google for the exact page of a companies website you are looking for, fill out a web form, get tons of confirmation responses, and wait forever.

🎙 #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:

• Could not find the exact article I read on Zoom fatigue but there are plenty. Here’s one.
• Noteflight
• Noteflight Learn
• SoundCheck Integrates with Noteflight
• Match My Sound Partnership
• PracticeFirst
• MusicFirst
• School of Rock
• My Choral Coach
• Dorico
• Music Ed Tech Talk Episode 10 - Designing Curriculum and Assessing Students with FileMaker, with Ben Denne
• FileMaker
• Virtual Tuning Disk | EMMSmusic.com
• Tonal Energy Tuner
• Soundtrap
• The Rest is Noise | Alex Ross
• Igor Levit is Like No Other Pianist - The New Yorker | Alex Ross
• Igor Levit and Franz Welser-Möst | Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 2 in Bb Major, op. 19

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

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Creating a Focused Home Lesson Planning Environment with Dark Noise and a Siri Shortcut

There's a new update to my favorite noise app, Dark Noise. I learned about this app from Craig McClellan during the App of the Week segment on episode 9 of the Music Ed Tech Talk Podcast.

Now that many teachers are working from home, I have found that managing my environment is key to my sanity. Dark Noise elevates the idea of a noise machine to a premium level, offering a superior user experience and all sorts of power user tools like Siri Shortcuts integrations.

One of my favorite Shortcuts is called Lesson Planning. The shortcut puts my phone in Do Not Disturb mode, starts a time tracker, takes a predetermined sound in Dark Noise, and plays it in a particular AirPlay 2 speaker in my house. For me, that's a Sonos Move speaker in the sun room.

You can download that Shortcut here: Lesson Planning

That version of the Shortcut is intended for public use. My personal version of it adds a step to set the hue of the lights in that same room.

The shortcut can be set to go off when I ask Siri, by launching it from a widget, or by even installing it as an app icon on the homescreen. Its never beyond a tap away. My custom phrase is "Hey Siri, I'm working in the sun room."

The new update includes some nice new features. Read this MacStories article for the details:

Dark Noise 2 Review: Sound Mixing, New Noises, iPad Cursor Support, and More - MacStories:

In Dark Noise 2 not only can you mix different sounds to create custom noises, but there are also eight new sound options to choose from, iCloud sync has been added for syncing your favorite sounds and custom mixes, and there’s optimized support for the iPadOS cursor. It’s a big release that retains the design elegance Dark Noise has had from day one, but expands the app’s usefulness in key ways.