TEFpad

I like this app and bought the pro version upgrade today but now the app has reverted to the LE version. Apple shows the pro purchase so what happened. Restoring the pro purchase was successful but I lost a significant amount of work.

The app assumes you know all the musical terms necessary to compose a song. The help function is useless. It throws items on the tab by all by itself, without any explanation as to why, and there is no information to learn from. As an example, trying to match the format of a tab I found in a book, it required a “double line” at the beginning of the measure. I found it in the pallet, tried to add it, but it wouldn’t show up. However, it did randomly place double lines on two other measures in the tab. And now I can’t get rid of them. Oh, how about the app crashing when you print? That’s fun too. Glitchy…but its all we have.

This app is just amazing in terms of what it allows me to do with arranging and playing back music. I wanted an app that would allow me, for guitar, to arrange music that is most often played on keyboards. I also wanted an app that would allow me to keep my files local on my device rather than forcing me to work in the cloud. With support for tablature, this app is great for arranging for guitar but it does a lot more. It would be equally useful arranging for keyboard and seemingly for a band, though I have not tried to arrange for more than one instrument. It plays midi and includes a lot of instruments. It’s ease of use is comparable to other notation softwares I have used. I was hesitant to buy without the ability to check it out with a free trial. It turns out though that, for me, this light version of the program—even without available pro upgrades— is all I will need in a notation program for a long time. I’ll never have to turn on a computer. The help pages are deliberately succinct so there is some amount of trial and error involved in figuring out some features. Overall, however, it’s just a super app.