Reading Session

This app is great in theory, but it falls down in execution. Sometimes some of the pieces will load, sometimes none of the pieces will load, but never do ALL of the pieces from a list load. And even on the occasions you’re lucky enough for any of them to load, it’s a lottery to see how long the app will run before crashing. Even the score marking functionality is poorly executed. It only needs to work well enough to make a few brief notes of first impressions from the reading session, but that’s too tall an order for this app. I’m not a JW Pepper hater. I use their website regularly and order from them often in both my professional and personal roles. Hopefully they’ll scrap this app and replace it with something that works.

Perhaps you will get lucky and it will work. Perhaps. I, and more than half of the participants in the session I attended, were not lucky. I thought I was being conscientious and logged in the night before to download the music. Progress was painfully slow (on wifi) but oh well, I thought, I have time! After downloading one score as a proof of concept I did another task on my device and went back to download the rest. Everything had been reset and had to be redownloaded - both the “event” and each score in the session. This was not an issue with storage space on the device (>50GB) but with a draconian and oppressive implementation. Long story short, between using two devices (both on wifi and with ample storage) I was able to load two (2) scores, and each took over 5 minutes to download. This meant that I had to plan ahead, setting a score to download while two others were sung and hoping that the app wouldn’t shut down half way through the process. I understand that we are gradually accepting the worsening of service by corporations so that they can continue to profit off of us and we are left with little or no recourse, but if you are organizing a session and intending to have this app be the only option for participation, do something else. Anything else.

Having finished the most recent Music Educators conference in Illinois, JW pepper though they could put out this buggy, immoral, and invasive app and no one would notice. The app serves very little value to anyone, least of all the music teachers and directors who rely on sample scores to peruse over the summers before we make our big purchases in the Fall. BE WARNED: THE PERUSALS ONLY LAST FOR 30 DAYS AND AFTER THAT THEY WILL DISAPPEAR FROM THE APP. Do not rely on this app for perusals, and I highly recommend anyone who comes across this app in the wild to send a strongly worded letter to JW Pepper that they should scrap this app entirely.