Beam Music

beam overall is great and has its own very nice features, but it was much better last year than it is now after all the updates. beam used to have horizontal lock but now it doesn’t and everytime it flips the music it does not go back to the correct saved zoom level that was set. it is also EXTREMELY laggy to the point i cannot write in my own notes or switch to another song fast enough because it is that laggy. while using beam my phone battery also goes down crazy fast. during just one hour of rehearsal my phone goes down at least 40%. it makes it very difficult to be able to perform at football games when students constantly have to worry about their phone batteries. developers really need to fix this, this complaint is also coming from an entire 150 student college university marching band.

The app is laggy and slow, no good for a pep band that needs to pull up music quickly. It wasn’t always this slow, so I have no clue what happened to make it how it is now. Even when pulling up pre-downloaded music on airplane mode the app is slow, so it’s not a network issue. The new portrait mode functionality is the worst. I have my phone attached to my lyre on my clarinet for pep band, and when we’re doing horn movements or are at rest, the music flips and I have to wait for the laggy app to be landscape again. And when it does go to landscape again, it doesn’t remember the zoom level it was at. At the very least, I wish there was a way I could turn off portrait mode for the music. Rotation lock on Apple devices defaults to portrait, so that doesn’t work (when it had in the past when the music could only be landscape, it wouldn’t ever flip). And then the best way to get around the bugginess and unreliability of this app was to just screenshot the music, but you can’t even do that anymore!! I understand that it’s anti-piracy protection, but when your app is as laggy as this, what is the point anymore? I can’t pull up music in time for it to be relevant and I can’t screenshot it to make my job easier.

Overall Beam is great! It’s easy to use on the field, especially the annotation features. In rehearsal I always mark my step offs in my music to help me remember. On game day, I used the live mode feature to stay in synch with my director. It worked well! But when I exited live mode and went to open my music at halftime, all of my notes were missing from my music. I tried closing and opening the app again but that wasn’t working. My notes kept coming back after zooming in and out but then would disappear again. This had never happened to me before. The only difference between rehearsal and game day was that I had used the live mode feature. But I don’t know how or if those features correlate. I do enjoy using Beam, and I hope this bug gets fixed!