MusicJOT

This app is a great new tool for composers. Anyone serious about having a tool easier to use than the big, expensive palette-driven desktop packages and one you can use on a train or plane should consider this app. This is not a toy, it is a full-featured composing tool for mobile users. The handwriting is magic and although it makes some mistakes, the developers appear extremely committed to continual updates. The interface is clean and easy to understand. The tutorials are clever and explanatory. I have contacted them with questions already and they have been very responsive. All the updates appear to be free. I don’t like getting lured into an app by a cheap price only to find that I have to spend more money just to get the thing doing something useful. Their approach seems more honest to me. I especially like the layers feature, which I’ve never seen before. When you’ve got lots of expressions and dynamics and slurs, it is easier to enter new stuff when you can hide all of that and just see the notes. I also think the palette (non-handwriting) aspect of the app is very well done. Dragging pitches up/down and durations left/right is super easy. They even have a little interval indicator when dragging pitches which is pretty cool. So you can drag a bunch of notes up and you can see how far (intervallic distance) you dragged before you even let go. Never seen that before. They’ve got the right approach to a monstrously difficult genre.

I have been a composer since I was 8 years old and am now 77. I was in a music composition dept for 40 years asa prod of composition. For me, working with a pencil, even on an iPad Pro is organic and natural. I use Dorico 3 now and am amazed at the progress they are making at being comfortable and and transparent; but, sometimes there is nothing quite like a pencil. I have tried several iOS notation programs and they just didn’t work or were clumsy musicJOT is the first program that I feel comfortable with and doesn’t get in the way. I give it a 5 showing faith in their future updates. There are few missing functions that I hope will find their way into the program. As it exists it is more useful for sketching on the iPad Pro then moving to dorico 3 through XML for detailed work than any other program.

I was staying away from this app for awhile to let it get its bearings together, and honestly I was just frustrated with all the crashes and difficulty using it. But I came back to it today after about a year of not bothering with it to see what updates have been made since when I did contact customer support they got back to me very quickly and resolved one my issues with the app. For one it runs much smoother than before, and I'm having less issues writing the notes and getting them in the system correctly. But unfortunately about part way through a new project it crashed and scrambled the notes once I opened it back up and basically ruined my project. It does have a lot of potential, I really want to like it, but for now I'm not completely sold on it or the price I paid for it. Thankfully it looks like it has a dedicated team working on it.