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