Symphony Pro - Music Notation

This app has useful functions built in. However, finding those useful functions is very difficult and not intuitive — even following user manuals or help instructions is unclear, difficult, sometimes impossible. Additionally, functions that I use frequently (and that are what I specifically purchased it for) are glitchy and unreliable. The app itself also frequently crashes completely without warning and restarts. Recently it keeps telling me to update the app but despite being completely up to date on my OS there is no update available or possible — but it keeps telling me to update every time I open! I eventually found mention of this in support forums that apparently the developers create the new version in the App Store long before releasing it, so apparently all users are constantly getting notifications about needing to update the app when there is no actual update available. It’s wild to me that this is something the developers are well aware of and think is fine. I waited to write this review thinking that maybe with time things would become clearer and maybe this was user error on my part, but I no longer think that is likely. I wish I had purchased a different app.

So, before this long overdue update, a lot of my projects were glitchy— unreliably glitchy. I’d have all sorts of weird problems with no workarounds. HOWEVER, with this new update, I have gone through my old projects, and there are absolutely no glitches! That alone merits five stars from me, but there’s more. It’s all seamless now. PDF export is perfected. There’s tons of customization options and features. I haven’t even had time to look into all the workflow improvements and Core MIDI implementations. I did a MIDI export on one of the example projects to test, and it cranked out a long, detailed six-track MIDI file with tempo and velocity variation with no problems at all. Of course, there are tons of things I haven’t tried, but I haven’t seen ANY bugs so far. None! Not on iPhone, not on iPad. It’s perfect, as far as I can tell. With this update, I believe Symphony Pro has solidified itself as the greatest scoring app on iOS. The only IAP is for handwriting recognition, which works as awesomely as everything else, by the way. Xenon Labs just gave me a last-minute Christmas gift, and I feel giddy.

It is a very impressive package, considering all the features that are built into the app. Was somewhat disappointed when, immediately after purchasing, I navigated to the in-app user manual, clicked on "submit feature request", and the app immediately crashed. When I then went to submit a crash report—the app crashed again. Notwithstanding, I am very impressed with the sheer volume of keystroke shortcuts to use the features—and since I am using an ipad keyboard case, this works well for my needs. However, as other reviewers have noted, the note input method is an incredible nuisance. Compared to what else is available on the ipad, and what reviewers are generally saying about them, Symphony Pro seems to my way of thinking yet the most reliable. All the music notation apps seem to have very compromising errors in their functionality, and not much in the way of signs of improvement (judging by what reviewers are saying, that is). Considering what's available, this is of very good quality.