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.
