Nearing Ten Years of forScore

Ten years ago this month Steve Jobs unveiled the original iPad, and this April will mark ten years since the iPad 1 went on sale. As one of the first apps for iPad, we’ll also be celebrating this April and marking a full decade since forScore 1.0 was released.

Back in 2015, we put together a retrospective to illustrate just how far we’d come, but forScore’s visual changes were far more striking during those first few years and we wanted to take a different approach to commemorate our app this time around. Instead, we’re doing a few different things: we’re assembling a Spotify playlist of songs made with forScore, featuring testimonials and anecdotes from our customers to celebrate the impact our app has had on their music, and more.

So we’re asking for your help! If you can, please visit forScore.co/submissions and see if there’s a way you’d like to participate and contribute (either way, feel free to share the link with friends). We’re very excited about this and it’s something we want to do together with our community—a celebration, not just some back-patting marketing initiative. We love making forScore and we cherish it not because of what it is, but because of what it enables musicians to do. We hope you’ll join us!

Holiday Updates

The holiday season is here and we’ll be taking some time off as we head into 2020. This has been a very big year for us and we can’t overstate just how thankful we are for our passionate users. We love making (and listening to) great music, and helping musicians do what they love is what keeps us going. Thank you.

Before we go, we wanted to take a moment to remind those who may not have seen this before that a great feature of Apple’s digital storefronts is the ability for someone to purchase content—like albums, movies, books, and apps—for other people. You can pay for the item, add a message, and even schedule the gift email to arrive on a specific date. When it arrives the recipient will get a download code that they can redeem with their own Apple account.

It’s a great way to send last-minute gifts, or to share an app you’ve enjoyed with someone who perhaps can’t afford or wouldn’t choose to buy it on their own. For more information on app gifting, check out this page on Apple’s website. Happy holidays!

Project Catalyst Questions

Yesterday Apple released macOS 10.15 Catalina and, along with it, the work they’ve done to make it easier for iOS and iPadOS developers to bring their apps over to the Mac (called “Project Catalyst”). We used it to create Mac versions of five of our apps, including Nocturne and all four Music Box apps, which are available now on the Mac App Store.

Making these apps was exciting and rewarding and although it took a lot of work to get them out the door while also prepping forScore 11.1 and getting all of our other apps ready for iOS/iPadOS 13, we couldn’t be happier with the end results. Catalyst is yet another tool developers have at their disposal to make great apps that take advantage of Apple’s great hardware and operating systems.

Of course, a lot of people will naturally be curious about whether forScore could come to the Mac and what that would look like. For now, the answer is that we don’t know. We’ve made a lot of progress on a possible Mac version of forScore as a proof of concept, but it’s just not good enough—we’ve gone as far as we can go with the current state of these tools and we’ll need to wait a little longer for Apple to build out a few additional frameworks before we’d be comfortable considering shipping anything.

Project Catalyst may have a simple marketing name, but it entails a ton of work across many of Apple’s different teams and it’s a longer term effort than a single update can encompass. We’ll be keeping a close eye on things as they progress and we’ll ship a Mac version of forScore if and when the end result is a product we can be proud of and that musicians can take full advantage of. Until then, thanks as always for your enthusiasm and support.

Nocturne for Mac

Today we’re pleased to announce that Nocturne, our single-track MIDI recorder for iOS and iPadOS, is available now on the Mac App Store as a standalone app for macOS 10.15 Catalina. We’re passionate about Nocturne and it’s just as great on the Mac as it has proven to be on iPhones and iPads: it gives musicians a streamlined, simple, fast way of recording their ideas as they come—no setup or waiting for sound banks to load, just hit record and go.

Nocturne

Available now on the Mac App Store

Introducing Mac Apps

We love Macs and use them every day to make our apps, which is why we’re so excited to announce that we’re bringing all of our Music Box apps to macOS Catalina! All four apps are available today on the Mac App Store, exclusively for Macs running macOS 10.15 (a free update for all compatible Macs).

If you’ve used these apps on your mobile device they’ll seem very familiar, but with support for Mac-only features like the touch bar and menu bar. It’s great to be able to bring these utilities and accessories to the Mac and we think this is just the start of what’s possible.

Apple did a tremendous amount of work to enable developers to bring their iOS apps to the Mac, and it’s a thrill for us to be a part of this exciting debut. Be sure to check out Cue, Beat Keeper, Pitch Please!, and TuneWave on the Mac App Store today.

App Store Issues

Over the past week or so, we’ve received numerous reports from users who have experienced a range of errors when installing, updating, or launching forScore. Here’s what we know so far:

• Some users have received the following error message when attempting to update or install forScore: “forScore No Longer Available. The developer has removed this app from the App Store.” We have not removed forScore from the App Store or made any changes that should have caused this message to appear.
• Other users who use Family Sharing have attempted to open forScore only to have it immediately animate back out to the home screen. Some of these users, though not all, have seen the following error message: “The application is no longer shared.” Again, we have not made any changes to our app that warrant this kind of message.
• We do not handle these App Store functions and these errors are completely beyond our control. They do not appear to be related to any specific version of forScore or the device’s OS (we’ve received reports from both iOS 12 and iOS/iPadOS 13).
• Some users have had success getting forScore to run again by using iOS’ app offloading feature. Due to the possibility of data loss, however, we recommend that you contact us here before attempting this so we can ensure your data is safe.
• We have made Apple aware of these issues and sent them all of the information we have regarding this. They have escalated the matter internally and we are awaiting further information.

We sincerely appreciate your patience and understanding with these issues. For now, rest assured that we have done everything possible at this point from our end and will update this article as soon as we know more.

iPadOS 13 Advisory (updated)

Due to an ongoing crashing issue related to system frameworks that we are unable to work around, we currently recommend that you remain on iOS 12 until further notice.

A previous version of this article offered significantly more context and detail concerning this issue and was removed at Apple’s request. We sincerely hope that doing so will improve our ability to work with them to resolve these issues so we can revise our recommendation.

forScore 11.1

It’s been a jam packed summer for us, and today we’re very excited to announce the immediate release of our latest free update to forScore, version 11.1.

This update isn’t just optimized for iOS 13 and the newly renamed iPadOS 13, it takes full advantage of the best Apple’s latest OS releases have to offer. From dark mode and contextual menus to document scanning and more, forScore 11.1 packs in a ton of improvements that musicians everywhere can benefit from.

For all of our users, even those who aren’t ready to update their OS just yet, there’s plenty to love—expanded support for keyboard shortcuts, annotation layer copy and paste, new options for Apple Pencil 2’s double tap gesture, and more. If you haven’t had a chance to check it out yet, our sneak peek offers a great look at what’s new.

And if you’re a forScore Pro subscriber with a device that features Apple’s TrueDepth camera system, you can try out our newest creation: face gesture page turning. Our favorite part of developing forScore is being able to combine innovative hardware features with practical software improvements; we think this is one of the best examples yet and we can’t wait for musicians everywhere to try it out.

Thanks once again to all of our customers, and especially to our incredible beta testers for helping us get ready for this big release. We couldn’t do it without you.

forScore 11.1

Available now for iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch

iTunes File Sharing Update

Earlier this year, Apple made a big announcement about iTunes: they’re discontinuing it on the Mac with macOS 10.15 (a free update coming in October). Instead, its responsibilities are being split up by media type into the new Music, TV, and Podcast apps. That’s left some of our users wondering about iTunes’ File Sharing panel, a long-standing tool used to copy files between an iPad or iPhone and a Mac, as well as the additional syncing functions previously offered by iTunes.

When macOS 10.15 ships later this year, those functions will all still be available, but they’ll be found within Finder instead (plug in your device, open a Finder window, then select your device from the sidebar). We’ve been beta testing macOS 10.15 all summer long, and while Apple hasn’t finished working on this transition, it’s been a painful one. The file sharing panel wasn’t available at all for months, and even now it’s incomplete, missing basic functionality like the ability to select multiple items.

We hope that Apple will make some progress on this front over the next several weeks and that the final version will be more complete, but we know that many of our users rely on this panel and we weren’t just willing to wait around with our fingers crossed. So we took matters into our own hands and built our own version of the File Sharing panel right into forScore Backup Utility. It works exclusively with forScore, but otherwise offers all of the same functionality and more: you can preview scores and even rename them without losing your annotations or metadata.

Some people think we have Apple’s ear, and unfortunately that’s just not the case. We know about as much concerning Apple’s plans as the average consumer does, so sometimes we have to make a tough call and put in the extra hours. In the end, though, we think we’ve created something valuable and we hope you find it to be every bit as capable (if not more) than the system functions it replaces.

forScore Backup Utility 1.1 is a free download for macOS 10.14 or higher, and the new File Sharing functions require forScore 11.1 or later.

forScore Backup Utility 1.1

Available now for macOS 10.14 or later

Minimum Requirements

With iOS 13 right around the corner and iPadOS 13 coming later this month, we’re getting ready for our next big forScore release and wanted to announce some upcoming changes to forScore’s minimum requirements that affects a small number of people: forScore 11.1 will require iOS 11 or later, meaning the iPad (4th generation), iPhone 5, and iPhone 5C will no longer be compatible.

Once we release forScore 11.1, new customers will not be able to purchase and install forScore on those devices. However, if you purchase forScore 11.0.4 now you’ll be able to continue using it as long as you like and you’ll also be able to re-download and install that version at any time if needed.

We’re proud to serve a wide range of musicians and we know that any update to our apps’ minimum requirements can become a barrier to some; we take these changes very seriously and only raise these requirements when we can no longer serve all of our customers adequately, as is the case now. We appreciate your understanding.

Updated 9/18: A previous version of this post stated that forScore 11.1 would require iOS 12 or later due to a major issue with Apple’s developer toolkit—this issue has since been resolved. As a result, forScore 11.1 will require iOS 11 or later and not iOS 12 as previously stated.