Over the past few months we’ve been working on a brand new app based on forScore’s on-screen piano keyboard, called Piano with Friends. This standalone version includes the same great features like a high quality sound bank, fine tuning, note labels, and MIDI support, but it also includes some new features that really make it deserving of its own app.
First, it supports typing input so you can play by pressing keys on a standard computer keyboard. There are several built-in layouts, but it also supports custom configurations so you can use it no matter which kind of keyboard you have. It’s the first of its kind that we’ve seen and we think it provides a great and highly flexible solution for everyone.
Piano with Friends, as the title hints, supports Apple’s forthcoming SharePlay feature which allows you to participate in group activities while on a FaceTime call. That means you can play piano with anyone, anywhere in the world.
All of that and more will be coming soon to iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, but we’re ready to start beta testing today. Just click this link to join our public beta and let us know what you think, or click below to learn more about our newest app.
Update: beta testing for this app has now ended, and Piano with Friends is available now on the App Store for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS as a single universal purchase.
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Today we’re proud to announce the release of forScore 12.1 with iCloud Syncing, available first to forScore Pro subscribers as part of their Early Access benefits. This update actually includes a ton of other improvements and enhancements for everyone, though, so we wanted to take a moment to point out a few of them:
Contextual Menus: Apple designed touch-compatible contextual menus to work with single items, but this limitation always seemed unnecessary to us. With forScore 12.1 we’ve managed to improve this—everywhere that forScore supports edit mode and multiple item selection, you can now pick two or more items and then tap and hold any one of them (or right click on it) to work with all of those items at once. We’ve also added a contextual menu to the title bar display so you can quickly perform common tasks with the current item.
Show In Library: One of the actions in the title bar’s new contextual menu is “Show In Library” and it reopens whichever menu you used to navigate to the current score. For instance, if you choose a score from the composer “Mozart” and later navigate to the “Classical” genre, this action reopens the Score menu and returns you to the “Mozart” list, scrolling to the current item and highlighting it for you. This new action is also available for configuration via the Page Turners & Shortcuts and Gestures settings panels.
Mac Upgrades: Late last year we introduced forScore for Mac and we’ve been working furiously ever since to make it even better. We brought one of forScore 12’s biggest new features, enhanced support for external displays, to the Mac by making it open up a secondary window that you can move to any monitor. We fine-tuned performance, squished bugs, made the sidebar resizable, and added subtle hover effects to a number of interface elements to make them feel more natural when used with a cursor.
Improvements: We spent most of our time working hard to build iCloud Syncing, but we also intentionally focused on “quality of life” improvements—little touches that really add up. We adopted iOS/iPadOS 14’s pull-down menus in more places, enhanced setlist pickers to use folder-based navigation, and we added right-click menus to the page and even to the tab bar so you can do many of the same things we discussed earlier but for any item open in a tab. Finally, we made changes to our default settings that will help mitigate the the worst effects of a system bug that Apple still hasn’t fixed a year later; hopefully that saga ends soon.
All of these changes and many others add up to the best version of forScore yet—still offered as a free upgrade for all users. Thank you all for your tremendous support and feedback!
Available now for iPad, Mac, iPhone, and iPod Touch
Today we’re proud to give you a first look at forScore 12.1, one of our most important updates ever with just one major new feature: iCloud Syncing.
Built upon years of hard work and with the utmost priority for ensuring that your music is always instantly available, forScore’s syncing engine coordinates with all of your devices to keep your music up to date automatically. It stores a complete copy of your library on each device, so there’s no need to wait for something to download when you want to play it.
We’ve been testing iCloud Syncing with our beta program, and now we’re getting ready to start rolling it out to everyone. To ensure that it’s fully optimized for all of our users, iCloud Syncing will be offered first as an Early Access feature for forScore Pro subscribers, and will be coming to all users later this year.
This feature has been high on many musicians’ wish lists since iCloud was unveiled years ago, and we worked hard to deliver the most reliable, sophisticated solution we could. It took far longer than expected, and we sincerely appreciate your support—it got us here today and ensures we can continue onward for years to come. Thank you!
forScore 12.1 Sneak Peek
Just a few short weeks ago we released forScore for Mac, and we’ve been pushing out minor updates across all platforms to fix bugs, iterate, and refine things even further now that Apple’s major OS updates have settled down.
As we head into the holidays, we’re continuing to push forward with development of iCloud Syncing. We’ve been testing it through forScore Labs since June and slowly increasing the number of slots available through TestFlight. Today, we released a new build and we’ve doubled our tester limit to allow even more people to participate. If you tried to sign up previously and weren’t able to, we invite you to check it out now. Click the button below to learn more about forScore Labs and to join the program if you’re interested.
We know a lot of people are anxiously awaiting more news regarding syncing, especially those who have downloaded the Mac version. Unfortunately Apple doesn’t currently offer TestFlight service for the Mac, so for now syncing with forScore Labs is available solely for iOS and iPadOS. Thanks for your patience, enthusiasm, and support; we hope to have more to share very soon.
Update: This testing phase is now concluded, but if we need help testing experimental features in the future we’ll let you know with a
news post like this one. Thanks very much to our testers, we sincerely appreciate your time and participation!
Today we’re absolutely thrilled to announce the highly anticipated release of forScore for Mac. It’s available exclusively for macOS 11 Big Sur and is offered as a Universal Purchase, meaning that it’s completely free for anyone who has ever bought forScore. Big Sur is also a free update, available starting today.
With the introduction of Apple Silicon-based Macs, it’s easier than ever for developers to get their iOS and iPadOS apps onto the Mac with no modifications—but that’s not what we’ve done with forScore. Instead of letting Apple shoehorn our apps exclusively onto their newest Macs (with significant limitations), we built a unique experience that highlights the best parts of the platform, highly optimized for Apple’s next generation of Macs, while ensuring full compatibility with the millions of Intel-based Macs that are already out there today.
It feels right at home with Big Sur’s dramatically overhauled interface—but it’s designed to be used, not just marketed as a proof of concept. It’s fully-featured and built to be a practical, everyday tool for musicians using almost any Mac. That’s also why we don’t charge separately for it—we want forScore on the Mac to be accessible, especially during this tough year.
It has been a long journey to get to this point, but we know this is just the start of what we’ll be able to do on some of the most incredible, powerful devices out there. Thank you all for your support and enthusiasm, they made today possible and we’re tremendously grateful. Be sure to check out forScore for Mac today, and visit this knowledge base article for complete details or to find answers to some common questions.
Available now for iPad, Mac, iPhone, and iPod Touch
Today we released forScore Backup Utility 1.2, a minor update that improves overall stability and replaces the app icon with one that’s more in line with macOS 11 Big Sur’s design guidelines. It’s absolutely free and available immediately. Learn more here.
Available now for macOS 10.14 or later
Today we’re happy to unveil forScore 12.0.7, a big update that includes some great new enhancements beginning with content providers—we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve partnered with Carl Fischer, Presser, and BriLee Music to bring their incredible content to forScore users everywhere. As with our other providers, compatible purchases you make through their marketplaces are made available for direct download through forScore’s Services panel as standard PDF files.
Since we’re now up to six content providers and growing fast, we’ve made some other improvements to forScore 12.0.7 that make it easier to get to your content quickly. First, you can now use contextual menus (tap and hold on iOS and iPadOS or right click with a pointing device) to favorite your preferred content providers and move them to the top of the list. For iOS 14 users, the main menu’s Import button now prompts you to pick from any of the sources you’ve configured—the Files app, by default, then any cloud storage or content providers you’ve logged into.
Finally, we’ve added a new “backwards navigation” setting to face gestures and AirPods Pro gestures that allow you to only turn pages forward if needed, reducing the likelihood of accidental turns and making theses gestures more reliable in certain cases. It’s a free update for all users, so be sure to check it out today!
Content Providers
Apple is set to make some big announcements tomorrow, likely debuting the first Macs built with their own custom “Apple Silicon” processors rather than Intel’s CPUs. They’re also likely to share the final release date for macOS 11 Big Sur, and we’re happy to announce that all of our Music Box apps and Nocturne have already been updated to support and take full advantage of these changes.
Not only are our Mac apps now optimized to run natively on Apple Silicon Macs and match Big Sur’s updated design, they do so without sacrificing compatibility with Intel-based Macs and continue to run on macOS 10.15 without any issues.
Apple took on a lot this year and the results are impressive and striking. As always, there will be many refinements and updates to come, but we’ve never been more excited for the future of the Mac and we’re proud to be a part of this momentous transition.
Back in August we announced forScore 12 and its upcoming debut on macOS. Nothing about our plans has changed, but forScore is built exclusively for macOS 11 Big Sur which Apple has not yet released, nor have they publicly announced when they expect to. This morning, however, they sent out invites for a Mac-focused media event scheduled for November 10th and we should learn much more then.
For now, we just want to reassure everyone that a few weeks of quiet on this front aren’t a sign that anything is wrong or has changed, just that we’re waiting along with everyone else. We think this is one of the most exciting things to ever happen to forScore and we can’t wait to show it off!
Update: Apple has now announced that macOS 11 Big Sur will be released on Thursday, November 12th.
One of the most interesting things Apple announced this year at WWDC was the ability for developers to access data from AirPods Pro’s motion sensors. It requires a firmware update for the AirPods that wasn’t released until September 14th—just two days before we released forScore 12—so we weren’t able to do anything with it right out of the gate. Now that we’ve spent a little bit of time with it we’re ready to introduce something we think is pretty neat.
With forScore 12.0.4, released today, you can now flip pages by turning your head to the left or right while wearing one or both AirPods. Unlike forScore Pro’s Face Gestures, these don’t use your camera and work just as well in the dark. Thanks to Apple’s unique Transparency mode, you can use these head gestures without impeding your hearing. It’s available to everyone for free and does not require a forScore Pro subscription.
Motion data is securely transmitted by Apple’s system frameworks from your AirPods to your device, and access to this data is only provided to forScore if you choose to allow it. That data is never stored or shared in any way, it is processed live solely to provide support for these new gestures. It’s totally private and opt-in.
It has been a huge year for us and we’re still going strong. If you’ve loved all of the improvements we’ve introduced so far, please consider taking a moment to rate forScore on the App Store. Updates like these are always totally free, so we depend on word of mouth and positive ratings and reviews to help us grow and continue to do more each year. Thank you as always for your passion, enthusiasm, and support.
Available now for iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch
