StaffPad Reader

Once you open a score, I guess it copies it to the a different folder? because when you try to open the same one again it says it cannot copy it because a score with the same name already exists. Since I can’t otherwise get past the syncing home screen, I can’t open any scores I have opened before. Its a pretty big bug.

I love StaffPad, but this app is still in the development phase. I haven’t actually tried syncing with other devices because I mainly use this app to watch music that I wrote in a more “readable” format (or to play along with individual parts). The problem is, I haven’t been able to get the automatic page turning to work for a while. It worked on and off when I first got the app about a year ago, but it hasn’t worked ever since. I emailed the developers, and they responded saying they would address the issue, but it hasn’t changed as of yet. Another thing I have found with this app (as well as StaffPad) is that when playing directly from the iPad speakers, it is unusually quiet (even with all of the audio settings set to full). It’s fine in headphones, but not the device speakers. Not sure why you can’t or haven’t made it louder, but that’s just a little annoying. I can see the potential that this app could have, but it isn’t there yet.

I know this is a free app, but it has a lot of potential with a lot of issues.. let me get straight to the list of issues: 1. Public annotation syncing (the grey annotation) only sometimes syncs back to Staffpad.. this is horrible. I’ve tested this several times, and i think you need to put a little more QA into this. The idea here is to ensure that things get synced, and there’s no way to really do that if it only half of the time works. 2. There’s an import function to import a Staffpad file, but no way to really save the annotations back to the main file.. you are stuck relying on this ScoreSync stuff, which only works (point #1). 3. If I’m in ScoreSync mode, i do not have a play button… Why is there a Play button that only works in import mode? I get that this is a feature, but this idea to have some central playback device is really limiting… can we not find a way to bypass this? S e.g. a menu option? 4. I strongly dislike this app’s reliance on a sync between devices… this seriously needs to be standalone - especially with the Import function and annotations… a performer is sometimes the composer, and therefore there needs to be a way to publically add annotations via the reader.. …but to be honest, a lot of what I’m looking for would simply be solved by adding a Page view to Staffpad…. This reader app is not really that useful for most, and I think the use case here is best solved in other simpler ways.