Touch Notation

This app is a sleeper, so useful, especially for leadsheets. the only one that I know of that you can write charts with your finger or a stylus and it will show up as perfect notation. NO DRAG AND DROP NOTES, which is tedious. Copying and pasting notes, bars, even whole sections of the song is so easy. It just takes a minute to get used to aligning your paste to the right note. So many things about this app are intuitive. Being able to resize bars and add an extra bar line is very helpful. I do have a few suggestions. The main one is to add a white ink pen color (like in ForScore) so that you can use that as an eraser for any pen markings that you might want to edit. The other suggestion is to be able to set a default font and size for text notes, which they call “musical expression”. Sizable D.S. And coda markings…..Rehearsal marks (A, B, C). Also, a single diagonal (1/4 note) slash for rhythm charts.

The input is very intuitive, more so than another notation app I bought for iPad. Unfortunately, after paying for it I discovered too many bugs which have not yet been addressed. 1. Copy and paste function is terrible! When copying a bar to another bar it doesn’t put the notes where they were in the copied measure, they get transposed all differently depending on where you touch the screen, so you have to sort of guess where to tap the screen, and if you guessed wrong, which you probably will do most of the time, you have to copy all over again and try to paste in the right spot, which is ridiculous. PLEASE FIX THIS!!! 2. Playback tool is too limited. This should be more like a standard playback tool with rewind and fast-forward controls not just play and stop. Also there should be a way to have it play back in swing like other notation programs can. 3. The sound is buggy. Sometimes it just doesn’t work, and the only way to get it back is for me to restart my iPad. I shouldn’t have to do that, the sound should be more robust than that. 4. There are some basic articulation’s and phrase markings which don’t exist in this app, such as marcato, falls, and glissando. I would be happy to write a more positive review if these items could be addressed and if the maker or makers of this software would show more interest in supporting it with more frequent updates as these problems are brought to their attention by users like myself who actually paid for it.

Have been using this app for on the go composing. Very useful once you get comfortable with the input methods. However this needs an update for the new iPad Pros (2018) so the app will display edge to edge. Also with the iPad Pros now supporting midi keyboards, note input via an external midi keyboard would be game changing.