Last week we released forScore 11.2 and one of its headlining features is Page Copy & Paste which allows forScore Pro subscribers to copy or cut a portion of a page’s contents and paste it elsewhere on that page, on another page, or even in another document. It extends the existing copy/paste functionality of the Selection annotation tool when used with the new PDF layer that’s automatically available on every page.
We know that some people who are anxious to use this feature aren’t necessarily familiar with the Selection tool, though, so we’ve updated our knowledge base article to provide step-by-step instructions. We’re sorry this wasn’t available last week, but we think it’ll help curious users get up and running quickly.
We occasionally get app reviews from users asking questions or seeking help, so we wanted to take a moment today to discuss how app reviews work and why they’re not a great way for forScore users to get answers.
For most of the App Store’s history, reviews were totally one-sided: developers couldn’t respond publicly or privately to offer help or ask for clarification. That changed a few years ago, but Apple limits the number of times a developer can respond to a review and, most crucially, they must approve each one and it can take up to a day for a response to appear on the App Store. At that point the reviewer is notified of the response via email, but if the reviewer doesn’t regularly check that email address the response may never be seen.
In general, reviews are great for offering your overall opinion about an app’s functionality and usefulness to you on the whole in a way that helps others understand if the app might be right for them as well. When you’re having a specific, temporary problem or don’t understand how something works, please get in touch with us first and let us help; you’ll get a much faster response, more detailed information, and be able to follow up with other questions at any time.
Reviews that follow these guidelines really do help. We just released our 17th major update to forScore, each one absolutely free for all users who purchased a previous version. If you bought forScore 1.0 for $2.99 back in 2010, you’ve gotten access to every single one of these updates and an app that does orders of magnitude more than it did at the start. If you can, please consider leaving a 5-star review and help us fuel all of the updates still to come.
Today we’re proud to announce the release of forScore 11.2, available immediately as a free update for all users. It’s a jam-packed release and we can’t cover it all here, so be sure to check out our update page to learn all about it. We think it’s easily the best version of forScore yet and we think musicians everywhere will love the new features, big upgrades, and incredible enhancements.
Thanks once again to all of our customers, and especially to our amazing beta testers for helping us get ready for this big release. Your support keeps us going and ensures we can keep releasing big new updates for years to come. Thank you, truly—we couldn’t do it without you.
Available now for iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch
April 1, 2020
| In Depth, News
This month marks ten years since we debuted forScore 1.0 and started a decade long journey that has taken us places we never could have expected. We’ve been incredibly lucky to be able to do what we love for so long, and to have a huge audience of musicians who not only enjoy using our app, but who energize and inspire us with their feedback, encouragement, and support.
We had planned on pulling together a playlist of songs made using forScore, interviews with musicians, and stories from our users across the globe. Now that April is here, that honestly doesn’t feel like the right way to celebrate. Like most of you, we’re facing tougher times right now—both professionally and personally—and it feels inappropriate to look back on the last ten years through today’s heavy lens.
Life carries on, though, and we’re continuing to work harder than ever to make forScore the best it can be. We know there’s a lot left to chart with the future of our app, so we took some time to commemorate this anniversary with an update to the retrospective site we put together five years ago. We added a few chapters not to rest on what we’ve done but to be able to look back another five or ten years from now and see how far we’ve come.
There’s plenty of music left in this world, and we’re grateful to have been a part of this journey so far with you. Thank you.
Ten Years of forScore
Today we’re excited to announce the release of Pitch, Please! 3.0, a big update to our pitch pipe that includes a new continuous playback mode featuring high-quality sound banks designed to sound great when looped indefinitely, as well as enhanced cursor support on iPadOS. This update is completely free and now a universal app, so you can buy it once and use it on your iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch (since Apple Watch and Today View widget interactions are designed to be as quick as possible, continuous playback is not available in these cases). Be sure to check it out today!
Available now for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS
We’re happy to announce the immediate release of Beat Keeper 3.5, the latest update to our standalone metronome app. This version features enhanced cursor support on iPadOS, so you can scroll with your trackpad or mouse to quickly and precisely adjust the BPM. It’s now available for macOS as a universal purchase, so you can download and install it onto your Mac at no additional cost. And, as always, it’s absolutely free for anyone who purchased a previous version. Click here to learn more about Beat Keeper, or get it on the App Store by visiting the link below.
Available now for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS
With macOS 10.15 Catalina, Apple made it easier for developers to bring their iPad apps to the Mac and we did so enthusiastically—debuting Mac versions of our four Music Box apps as well as Nocturne.
When Apple announced these updates, they positioned it as a multi-year project and at the time they made it clear that Mac apps could only be sold separately from iOS and iPadOS versions. We expected this to change in a year or two, but last month Apple unexpectedly announced that they would soon begin allowing developers to adopt Universal Purchases meaning that customers could buy an app once and install it on all of their compatible devices at no additional charge.
Making our Mac apps took a lot of work at a time when our resources were already stretched thinly with iOS and iPadOS 13’s massive changes, so we felt like charging for these Mac apps was an acceptable but temporary tradeoff. We always planned to offer universal apps as soon as Apple allowed us to do so, and that’s exactly what we’re doing.
Unfortunately, Apple provides developers with no way to combine apps once they’ve been released. If you’ve bought our iOS/iPadOS apps they’ll now run on the Mac too, but the standalone Mac apps have been discontinued. If you bought any of these Mac apps and you don’t already own the iOS/iPadOS version, get in touch with us so we can make sure you continue to receive all future updates.
Our strategy has always been to make something great and release it when it’s ready, and although this transition is trickier than we’d like we stand by the decisions we made. If you supported us by buying any of our Mac apps, thank you—it truly made a difference and allowed us to ensure that these apps have a bright future on the Mac.
Note: Ongoing App Store issues prevent users’ purchase histories from updating correctly and may display our Mac apps as unpurchased even for users who own the iOS or iPadOS counterparts. This is incorrect and you should be able to download them without being charged a second time. Please visit
this page to learn more.
This week Apple released iPadOS 13.4 and, with it, introduced full support for using an iPad with a mouse or trackpad. We’ve tried it out with forScore and have been pleased with the results right out of the box, but we’re most excited about ways we can update our app to take full advantage of the new tools Apple has given developers.
So today we’re happy to announce that with forScore 11.2, due for release soon and already in beta testing, we’re adding convenient new capabilities such as page turn gestures, the ability to scroll up and down to adjust the metronome or pitch pipe, full support for pinch and pan gestures when zooming in on a page or cropping it, and more.
We’ve updated our sneak peek and added an info page to give you a sense of what you can expect when this update is ready. With this week’s hardware and OS updates, Apple has proven once again that they’re far from done pushing the iPad forward and we’re proud to be able to put these enhancements to good use.
Our next big update is almost ready, and today we’re very excited to be able to give you a first look at what’s coming in this incredible new version. Here is just some of what you can expect to see in forScore 11.2:
We’ve completely rewritten our Crop interface with three goals in mind: enhanced precision, greater flexibility, and the ability to crop or uncrop all pages of a document at once. We re-thought every control and interaction, added a bunch of new capabilities, allowed for more freedom when positioning your page, and built it for maximum performance and efficiency. There’s way too much to go into here, so be sure to check out the sneak peek article below for more details on this exciting upgrade.
Next, we added some big new things when it comes to Content Providers. We’re welcoming Virtual Sheet Music to the growing list of providers, you can now download Musicnotes purchases in any available transposition, and you can set up automatic downloads to let forScore add new purchases to your library as they become available.
The Pitch Pipe now features a new continuous playback mode so you can hear a note indefinitely, and Buttons can now be configured to use a specific sound bank. Spotlight integration makes it easy to find your setlists, scores, and bookmarks right from the home screen, while improvements to library management make browsing and managing your files better than ever. And, when you’re annotating, optional two- and three-finger taps make undoing or redoing markings a breeze.
For our forScore Pro subscribers, we’re introducing Page Copy & Paste. A new default annotation layer, the “PDF” layer, works just like any other—except that when you use the selection tool to copy or duplicate an area, it copies the contents of the page itself so you can reposition them or paste them on another page or even into another document.
That’s a very quick overview, so for more details be sure to visit the page below. As always, this update will be completely free for all existing users and we think it’s a big step up. If you want to take it for a spin today, consider becoming a beta tester to try out early versions and help us get it finished. Otherwise, stay tuned for more!
forScore 11.2 Sneak Peek
Last year, with the release of macOS 10.15, Apple restructured iTunes and replaced it with the Music app. As a result, Apple’s File Sharing panel (which was previously found within iTunes) was moved into Finder instead.
While we expected that Apple would maintain this panel’s functionality, key features like the ability to select multiple files were inexplicably left out. In response, we built our own file sharing interface within forScore Backup Utility (this article we posted at the time explains that in greater detail if you missed it). Not only did we restore the functionality Apple removed, but we added a few nice touches of our own and were proud of the end result, even though we expected at the time that Apple would soon fix their panel’s problems and that most people would end up going back to that built-in solution in the end.
Instead, those features are still missing and we’ve just discovered another huge issue with Apple’s File Sharing panel that we need to warn our users about. When adding files to an app through Finder, you won’t be prompted if a file already exists with the same name. Instead, the app’s copy is permanently overwritten with the computer’s copy and there’s no way to undo this or recover the file.
For this reason, we want to reiterate that we absolutely do not recommend using Apple’s File Sharing panel in macOS 10.15 (users running macOS 10.14 or earlier and those using Windows can continue to use the unchanged iTunes version without any such issues). Learn more about our free backup utility here.
