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Will Kuhn and David MacDonald return to discuss Logic and Final Cut for iPad, the Ableton Push 3, Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference, and the Apple Vision Pro. Robby struggles with his internet connection.
In the Patreon feed: Zelda Talk.
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Thanks to my sponsors this month, Scale Exercise Play-Along Tracks.
Show Notes:
Half Notes: A comparison of tablet music reader technology experiences - Scoring Notes
The best iPad score reader for most people 2023 update - Scoring Notes
App of the Week:
Robby - Sequel
Album of the Week:
Robby - KNOWER FOREVER
Will - [1000 Gecs](https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kmoCFzuKniN8yTiL701Ardjwq7oMkvnz8
David - WDR Big Band on YouTube
Where to Find Us:
Robby - Blog | Book
Will
David
Art by Ryan Bailey.
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Tim Chaten, host of the iPad Pros podcast, joins the show to talk about Apple's announcements at their WWDC Keynote this month.
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Thanks to my sponsors this month, Scale Exercise Play-Along Tracks.
Where to Find Us:
Robby - Twitter | Blog | Book
Tim Chaten - Twitter | Website
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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.
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
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The best news from WWDC 2017 (in my opinion) was improvements to iOS 11, particularly the iPad productivity features. MacStories has a really good overview of all the primary features that are coming with iOS 11 in the fall.
iOS 11: The MacStories Overview:
Alongside the storm of iPad-specific features, the next version of iOS will also bring advancements to the Lock screen and Control Center interfaces. Built-in apps and services such as Maps, App Store, Notes, Messages, Podcasts, Music, Siri, and more received individual updates — some more comprehensive than others. The new ARKit and Core ML frameworks were announced as well, giving us our first tangible examples of Apple's investments in AR and developer-friendly machine learning.
Despite a decade in the wild, in many ways iOS is still a young operating system. It's good to see Apple not resting on its laurels, but instead continuing to reevaluate and redesign the areas of the OS that need it — such as iPad productivity features and the App Store. The ground-breaking potential for iPad users in iOS 11 shows just how much that aspect of the system has been neglected, but many of the other changes show how Apple's slow refinements over years are paying off.
Below you'll find a detailed look at what Apple is unabashedly calling "turning iOS up to 11."
Here are some quick and dirty thoughts I have on many of the announcements at Apple’s WWDC Keynote on Monday.
Disappointed we didn’t get any new features in tvOS. Maybe next year with the introduction of new Apple TV hardware. YAY for the announcement of an Amazon Prime app though.
Not really impressed here. The main things I think Apple Watch struggles with are…
Access to audio controls
A more predictive, contextual, ability to show things on the watch face
As for 1, Apple did address this by making music controls a swipe away while running a workout in the Workout app. I was hoping for something a little bit more globally accessible. They accomplished 2 by introducing the Siri watch face. But for me, the Siri watch face is too much of a compromise because it can’t show any other complications on the screen at the same time.
I am also disappointed that they didn’t announce a Podcast app or Notes app.
No complaints here really. I wanted them to start the process of breaking iTunes down into smaller apps. Maybe at least breaking Apple Music into its own app and TV into its own app and leaving the rest of the things iTunes does inside the app known as iTunes. Really though, I am cool with Apple making slower and steadier updates to macOS. My Mac is the machine I depend on the most for work so I appreciate that Apple is focused on stability.
The new iPads look great! I can see myself eventually buying the 10.5 size. I love my 12.9 inch for reading scores with the forScore app, but I really miss being able to hold it comfortably with one hand and also reading it in bed. Maybe the 10.5 inch will be the perfect compromise.
The iMac Pro looks fantastic. Its not a machine I am looking for right now though so I will just enjoy it from far away and appreciate that Apple still cares about the Mac and its professional users.
Drag and drop: YES! Love it. Looks really well implemented too.
Dock: YES! A great idea I did not expect.
Files app: This is where I started to loose my mind. A native file browser with support for Google Drive and Dropbox is going to completely change the way I use my iPad! This might be my favorite announcement of the entire keynote.
System wide markup. This is another one that is going to completely change the way I use my iPad.
Notes app: Sooooo much good stuff here. In line drawing? AWESOME! Document scanner? AWESOME. Text searchable handwriting. YES! Bye Evernote.
… yeah. So this iPad stuff is going to be huge.
Smart of Apple to position this device as competition against companies like Sonos instead of as competition for products like Google Home and Amazon Echo. The speaker ecosystem is something I really enjoy about having Sonos speakers but its lack of integration with my phone and music library is a constant hurdle. Something with good quality, that I can operate without using an extra app would be much more enjoyable.
Will I buy one of these? It is really hard to see how this will play out. Amazon Echo and Sonos are working on some kind of integration. That could potentially keep me in that ecosystem, though the idea of selling the Sonos speakers and eventually replacing them with these Apple things has crossed my mind. It might be the kind of situation where I get one HomePod just to get a feel for it and then wait on additional purchases.
I love how passionate Joe Steel is about the Apple TV. Read his WWDC 2017 tvOS wish list here.
The ATV is my go to device at home. Despite its many flaws, I really enjoy mine. Steel echoes many of the features I included on my own WWDC 2017 wish list.
Apple Music is coming out. Apple’s purchase of Beats last year, in addition to a ton of recent rumors, makes it pretty clear that a new iTunes update is going to be announced at Apple’s software developer conference, WWDC, on Monday. It will likely integrate the Beats streaming music catalogue into iTunes on all Apple devices and introduce some new features.
I am currently a happy Spotify user. I am also a pretty efficient dude. I hate using two music apps and cannot wait to use just iTunes for all of my musical needs. I am also an extreme edge case when it comes to digital music libraries. I am not a casual listener. I am an archivist. iTunes is not just a way to casually listen to my favorite songs. It is a tool for managing educational resources, searching for recordings spanning a lot of genres and time periods, and general purpose audio file organization. My iTunes Library is about 600 GB and I have no wish to massively downsize it any time soon.
Below, I have detailed some wishes for Apple’s new streaming service. Some of these suggestions will likely be announced on Monday. Others are reasonable but not going to happen just yet. And a few are incredibly unlikely just on the premise that Apple is not going to pump major resources into features that are appealing only to me and not the mass market.
I want to search for Snarky Puppy and see the albums of theirs that I own, and those on Apple’s streaming service. And I want them all to appear in a smartly organized list where all of them are ready for playback as if they were living on my computer’s hard drive.
When I find something in Apple’s streaming database, I want to add it to my music library and playlists and have those songs appear alongside the ones I own, listenable offline if I so choose.
What is the worst part of Apple bundling a streaming music service into iTunes? iTunes is a terrible app. It is slow, bloated with features, and used for a ton of things beyond music listening.
I hope Apple takes a cue from the iPhone and separates iTunes on the Mac into five separate apps: Music, video, podcasts, iTunes University, and iTunes Store. Bonus points for separating any current iTunes features relating to the upkeep of an iOS device into a separate app.
I currently subscribe to iTunes Match, a service that uploads your iTunes library to the cloud. Songs that are on the iTunes Store are matched, other audio files are uploaded. There is a 25,000 song limit for files that are not on the iTunes Store. Hopefully the pending update to Apple’s music services will allow users to upgrade their storage limit and use iCloud Drive storage that they have purchased towards more file uploads.
There are audio file types that iTunes supports on a Mac but will not sync over the cloud. Hopefully Apple fixes this in the coming update. I want to access my entire library on the go, not just those that Apple deems valid.
It would be fantastic if iTunes could use its new streaming catalogue to clean up my album art and other poorly organized information. In some cases, I have attempted to do this manually and iTunes Match has actually reverted back to old cloud backups, undoing tedious work.
In my perfect world, iTunes would also allow me to tag music and consistently add information to tracks and albums including but not limited to: personnel on jazz recordings, director/ensemble/composer on classical recordings, record labels, etc. It would be even better if iTunes could differentiate, say, a recording of works by Beethoven, properly tagging each work with the various conductors and ensembles that performed them. This metadata could be cloud based and crowd sourced. For example, I could elect to add it myself, and have it sync across devices[1] or choose to have my files augmented with popular user submitted data. If this were not already useful enough for better organizing and searching a personal library, imagine now how powerful this becomes if it is built into the global search of iTunes. For example, I could search for “recordings of Fritz Reiner and Chicago Symphony Orchestra between 1956–1960,” “albums that John Coltrane played on,” or “records released on Blue Note.”
It would also be really interesting if Apple would extend their system wide tagging feature to iTunes songs. I would love to tag audio files with keywords and have them appear with other files with the same tag in the Finder. I could, for example, tag a recording of my middle school band with “Lake Elkhorn Middle School.” When searching for this tag in the Finder, I would be greeted with all of the documents on my hard drive that I have tagged this, alongside related iTunes files.
Here is a feature for both power users and the masses. Allow for better support with lyrics. I should never have to leave my music app to see the lyrics of a song. Ideally, these could appear with the click of a button, with each word highlighted in real time,[2] and the possibility to easily copy and paste them.
Keep this one simple, Apple. Here is all you need: add friends, share playlists, follow playlists, follow playback, one click sharing to social media.
I have always wanted iTunes to allow for third party plugins. I find myself often slowing down and looping small sections of music for practice or educational purposes. It would be cool if these power features could be added to iTunes so that I did not need to start up a project in GarageBand or Pro Tools every time I want to do something as simple as slow down a track or splice out a short audio sample. Oh well…
We will see what happens on Monday. I am banking on the streaming and playlist features I mentioned above. There will probably be some attempt to make radio more engaging by perhaps the hiring of artists to DJ human curated stations. Expect some simple social features as well.
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