The Rearrange tool is a powerful part of the forScore toolbox, allowing you to move, duplicate, and rotate pages of a score. You can even split a large score up into smaller chunks, great for compilation files that can get out of hand.
Splitting up large files into many different pieces is one thing, but when you’re working with a bookmark you may want to simply create a new PDF of those pages and leave the rest of the source file alone. Fortunately, if you’re viewing a bookmark and you open the Rearrange tool, it’ll only load that bookmark’s pages so you can immediately tap the “Save as” button to turn that bookmark into its own file. So the next time you find yourself emailing a bookmark to yourself, remember to use the Rearrange tool instead.
Our sneak peek at forScore 9 continues today with a look at some big changes coming to the metadata panel and menus. Of course, metadata is a huge part of forScore; it’s what allows users to work with thousands of scores without getting bogged down by endless lists and similar names.
There are a lot of ways you can sort, separate, and search for your scores, but many of our users want something more. Some need an ‘arranger’ field, while others would prefer a reference number or year. Unfortunately, there are only so many different pieces of information we can make room for before things start to get unusably complex. That’s why we’re doing two things that we think will really help.
First, we’re adding a new top-level category type called ‘Labels’ which can be used to add comma-separated values to your scores just like you can now with composers, genres, or tags. Of course, ‘labels’ is a pretty generic name and that’s by design because of the second big change we’re making.
The Genres field has always been customizable if you knew where to find the option near the bottom of the settings panel. It’s something we added long ago, but it never quite felt like enough. Now, we’re making most of forScore’s metadata fields renameable and you no longer have to venture off to the settings panel to do so. Just tap on the name of a field to change it. That includes composers, genres, tags, labels, rating, difficulty, time, and key, so now you can set everything up just how you like it.
That’s not all, though; we’ve put a little extra bit of info down at the bottom of the metadata panel in the Layout section. You’ll still see the current and total number of pages, but you’ll also find the current item’s filename, file size, and usage statistics (if you’ve allowed the new Dashboard feature to collect that information). You can tap the usage text to cycle through your totals for today, this week, or this month. If you’re viewing a score you’ll find the page offset field and margin adjustment slider, and if you’re viewing a bookmark you’ll be able to edit its start and end page number.
We know there will always be people who want more fields and people who use few or none of them. We think this is the best way to provide additional capabilities without sacrificing clarity and usability, and we think it’ll make a big difference for many of our users. All that and more is coming soon with forScore 9, so stay tuned!
Setlists are a great way for musicians to group songs arbitrarily and play through all of them in a row without returning to the menu after each piece. No matter how well you plan for your next show, however, at some point you’ll need to make last-minute adjustments.
The setlist editor shows your setlist’s contents on the left and your music library on the right. Tap a song on the right, and it’ll be added to the end of your setlist on the left. But if you tap one of your setlist’s items on the left instead, that item will start pulsating with a gray background. Now when you tap an item on the right it’ll replace that pulsating item in your setlist. So instead of deleting the old item, adding the new one, and dragging it into place, you can do all of that in just a few seconds. It’s a small convenience when you’re working with short setlists, and a life-saver when you’ve got dozens of items in your list.
We’re working hard to get forScore 9 ready for release this summer, and today we want to give you a sneak peek at a big new feature called Dashboard.
Dashboard brings a whole new level of personalization to forScore, and we’ve never done anything like it. If you allow it, Dashboard notes which scores, bookmarks, and setlists you view and for how long. With that information, it can do a few interesting 
things that give you valuable insights into your playing habits and help keep you on track.
The Analytics tab of the new Dashboard interface gives you a clear overview of your usage. It can display items (scores and bookmarks) or setlists, and it can show the number of times you viewed them and for how long. A timeline totals these statistics for each of the past ninety days, and you can tap on any day to see which items or setlists you played, ranked by time or number of views. You can even tap one of those items to see how often or how long you played it over the past ninety days.
The Reports tab allows you to create templates and generate PDF reports based on certain criteria, such as unit of time (day, week, or month), length of time (e.g. the past three weeks), and whether to show items, setlists or both. They can be item- or setlist-specific, or they can show everything. Once you set up a report template, you can quickly generate a PDF with just a tap and share it with your colleagues or an instructor.
The Goals tab allows you to create goals and track your progress per day, week, month, or all-time. The main view gives you a quick overview of your progress towards each of your goals, and you can select one to edit it or show more detailed information. A timeline along the top shows your statistics for each day, week, or month, and you can tap any of them to share your results with friends or colleagues via email, iMessage, Twitter, Facebook, and more. It’s a lot of fun, and brings an entirely new shared experience to forScore.
These tools provide a whole new level of personal accountability and can help you make meaningful progress based on real numbers. We’ve never collected this kind of information before, so we’re being extremely careful about maintaining our customer’s privacy. That’s why forScore only tracks your usage if you explicitly allow it to do so, and never shares that information under any circumstances—it’s stored locally on your device and never transmitted anywhere.
All of this is coming this summer with forScore 9, along with our new Buttons tool and consolidated audio utilities. That’s not all, though, so check back soon for even more!
Since forScore 1.0, you’ve been able to type in notes for a specific page of your score. Unlike text annotations, however, these notes aren’t visible on the page so you have to remember that they exist and open the Notes interface to read them. They’re more useful for longer blocks of text, but when we added text annotations a few months later most people found those to be more appropriate for shorter phrases.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for the Notes feature, though, and in forScore 4.0 we made an important change that really made it useful in its own unique way: reminders. Instead of needing to go in and check if you’ve added any important information to every page you play, reminders display your text near the top of the page for a few seconds and then get out of your way. They only appear once until you leave the score and come back to it, so you can navigate freely and handle repeats without seeing the same notes over and over again.
Reminders are page-specific, so you can turn them on (flip the “Remind Me” switch in the Notes editor) for your high-priority notes and leave them off for the rest. Reminders even work great in two-up view, using one alert to display notes from both pages simultaneously!