10.4: Musicnotes

This week we released forScore 10.4 and forScore mini 3.4, bringing some exciting new and updated features for us to explore. We’re starting today with a big one: Musicnotes integration.

While forScore gives you a wide range of capabilities and is designed to be as efficient as possible, the bottom line is that your experience with forScore depends heavily on the quality of your content. The less work you have to do to accommodate crooked scans in large image-based files, the better forScore performs. Digitally-created files are best, providing high-quality representations of music with tiny file sizes. They’re much easier for iOS to display, so pages load faster and use less battery power.

That’s why we were so excited when Musicnotes, the world’s largest distributor of digital sheet music, came to us and proposed allowing forScore users to connect to their Musicnotes accounts and download their purchases as standard PDF files. That’s exactly what we did, and now forScore’s Services panel gives you access to both Cloud Services (things like Dropbox and Box) and Content Providers (Musicnotes). Just tap on the Musicnotes item in the list and sign in to see your purchase history. Tap any item to download it, or tap “edit” and select multiple pieces to download at once or to download and add to any of your setlists.

There are no extra steps, no settings to change, and no additional fees. Whether you’ve already built up a long list of purchases or you’re just starting out, Musicnotes offers hundreds of thousands of arrangements, opening up a whole new world of premium content to our users. Best of all, these are fully licensed and you don’t have to worry about the legal gray areas of copyright law.

We want everyone to have access to great content, and we’re extremely grateful to Musicnotes for taking this big step with us. If you’re looking for something new to play and want to support us and all of the people behind the music, be sure to check out Musicnotes.com.